 Welcome to Getting Clean on the Prairies. So it's another beautiful day out here in the garden and it is time to get some containers ready, get some the soil refreshed and hopefully get some stuff planted today. So I'm just starting off by spreading on my tix spray. I haven't seen any tix yet but there is likely some out there. So today I want to plant up some potatoes. I got some shitting and ready to go. They got some nice sprouts on them. So I'm going to try growing three different kinds in some big containers. I'll show you how I set them up. And we're also going to try using some straw instead of soil to plant these. Kind of similar to the Ruth Stout method but using a container. So let's get started. So my first thought was to try using some of these big red mineral tubs that I used for my garden to grow potatoes in. But then I got thinking about the harvesting of the potatoes and how it would be pretty difficult to dump these out and harvest potatoes. So I'm going to save these ones for some different root crops. So what I plan on filling up and using today is just some of these big black pots that usually you get a tree and are some kind of big plant from the nursery. They work great because they got some drainage holes. I think being black they'll hold the heat. It's still fairly cool here right now with some freezing temperatures at night. But so yeah I'm going to try filling up these three containers and we'll get some potatoes in there. So the reason I thought I would try growing these potatoes with straw in the containers is just to save on the amount of soil that you have to fill up these tubs. It takes a lot of compost, peat moss, potting soil, whatever you're using to fill your pots. It can take quite a bit to fill up these ones that I think are about 20 to 30 gallons. And because I grow my potatoes under straw here in my garden successfully I thought why not, why wouldn't this work in pots as well. So I'm going to mix up some soil. I'll show you how I do that and we're going to just fill these pots halfway. So I've dumped some potting soil in here and this is just some older soil, a bag of soil I've had around for a couple of years. I thought I would use it up. I'm going to add some peat moss in just to give it some extra moisture retention. Now I'm just going to take it over to my compost bin and see if we can get some finished compost into there as well. So my compost here is not quite fully composted here in the bin but I'm going to try and sift some through my DIY compost sifter here that I made and see if we can get a little bit into our soil mixture here. I haven't quite mastered the art of composting here. I've got two bins going but from a lot of videos I've seen a three bin system works better. I just find it's hard to get it fully broken down before I need to use some so with this sifter I can kind of get the good stuff and put back what didn't go through the sieve and let it keep composting down. This is a lot of my garden refuge from last fall. You can see the corn husk did not break down yet. So I find the best way to sift through here is just to use your hands and rub it through. I think even in these containers being that they're pretty deep some partially broken down material will not be a bad thing. Okay so we've got some really nice compost now mixed to mix in here. I think we'll just add a little bit of fertilizer and we'll be ready to put it in the pots. So I'm going to use two different fertilizers in my soil mixture here. I'm going to put in some blood meal which is a high nitrogen fertilizer and then I'm going to just add some of this all purpose fertilizer it's a 444. I'm going to just do a handful of this. The straw that I'm going to be putting on top is pea straw so it does have a lot of nitrogen in it so that may add to the to the fertilizer that potatoes like. So I just put a small sprinkle and then a handful of this organic. Now before you start filling up your buckets with soil I recommend that you put some kind of lining in the bottom so that all your your nice potting soil doesn't wash away every time you water or it rains. So just to kind of keep these holes filtered. What I'm using here are coffee filters. I collected a bunch of coffee from a local coffee shop for my compost and these filters are very slow to break down so I just took a bunch of them out of my compost and shoved them in the bottom. You could also use newspaper, any kind of paper, shredded paper, leaves. I think I might even throw some leaves on top of this as well. I also decided that I'm going to do two with the straw method and then do one all dirt and then we have something to kind of compare the two methods with at the end of the summer to see if it makes a difference. Okay so let's get these things potted up. Okay so I have three different kinds of potatoes we're gonna put into our three pots here today and as you can see I've been chitting these and they've got some really nice healthy green sprouts coming on them. So I'm gonna be putting three into each pot. I've taken some paint sticks, wrote the name on each of these and spray painted it with some clear spray paint just so the color or the name doesn't fade or run. This one actually did run anyway after I sprayed it but these are good markers if you ever get a hold of paint sticks you can grab a handful paint store they work good in these tubs. Okay so we're just gonna put three in each and then from there we will cover up the Yukon Gold we're gonna do an all dirt. The Red Norland and the Russet Gold Rush are gonna go with straw on top and yeah so let's cover them up. So something I forgot to do before I covered the Yukon Golds and dirt was give everything good watering so make sure you give everything a good drink that soil nice and saturated. So I'm curious as to whether anybody's tried this method before of kind of the Ruth Stout method in buckets. If you have or if you have any comments about this method that you'd like to leave me below I would sure like to hear them. As I said before we use I use peace straw in my garden and this is something that we had at the farm for the cattle they weren't too fussy about it so lucky me I get to have the bales that the cows rejected because my husband's a little bit reluctant to share any of his nice alfalfa hay bales with me but I think this is gonna work good it's it's a nice or chopped up type of straw it spreads pretty good and we think because it was peace straw it should have some nitrogen maybe in the in the stalks it maybe will add to the soil. So I'm gonna use some as a mulch on top of this one it's got the dirt just to keep in the moisture keep the ground warm or the soil warm. As I said it's still getting below freezing temperatures here we're just at the last day of April so I'm hoping these block containers will help retain some of the daytime heat that comes from the Sun and keep them warm and cozy at night and they will start little green sprouts will keep growing. Thing is about straw it's really tempting to always pick it up and see what's going on underneath I do that a lot with my my potatoes under straw in the garden. Take a little peek see if anything's growing so it will be probably in a couple weeks when the ground gets a little bit warmer planting potatoes under straw I'm also gonna try some corn and we'll see what else you can stay tuned for those videos and I just realized I didn't see which ones I which ones are red norland which ones the gold rush but luckily I can pick up my straw I have one last peek I can see this is the red red norland keep it marked and the nice thing about these they're not too heavy you can move them around so I'll put them in a nice sunny location right now and then once I get my garden organized for the summer I can move these if I need to. So I hope you found this video informative and we'll stay tuned to see the results of my planting potatoes under straw in a bucket and please hit the like button subscribe if you haven't already and click on that notification bell so you don't miss out on the next video. Thank you for watching