Will Potatoes Grow In The Shade?

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Do you have a shady spot in the garden and want to know if potatoes will work in it? Well, that is precisely the dilemma I faced, so I thought I would test it and find out, so let’s have a look and see how I got on!

Read on to find out how I tested this out and came to the conclusion above!

Trying To Grow Potatoes In The Shade

Right at the bottom of my allotment, I have a large metal fence about 4 or 5ft high that runs the plot length. This is made of solid sheet roofing metal and happens to be on the south side of the plot.

So what this means is that the area right up to this fence gets no direct sunlight, none at all, it is in shade all day long.

Obviously, this poses a bit of a conundrum to the gardener and you wonder what will grow there. After leaving this patch bare for a year I decided to try and grow something there and to see what happened.

The crop I chose to grow was the humble potato, more because I had some spare seed potatoes left and thought why not? Rather than anything more profound.

So here they are, my potatoes in a pit. You can just see the bottom of the fence here and can also see that the sunlight just reaches the area where the grass starts. The potatoes will be in permanent shade.

Happily Growing In The Shade

Here you can see that the potatoes are happily growing away in this shaded patch, it also demonstrates just how the sun misses them entirely.

So the foliage is growing, but will any tubers develop? Is the plant able to suck up enough energy to store and create nice big spuds if it is not getting direct sunlight, I guess I will have to wait and see.

Harvesting My Shade Potatoes

So the time has come to harvest my shade-grown potatoes and see whether this experiment has been a success or a failure. Time to get digging!

Here is the patch before I started digging and as you can see there is only one potato plant (right in the back left corner) still standing.

I don’t know whether it was to do with the shade or not but these potatoes died back really suddenly, one day they were there and the next they were gone.

So there they are the potatoes grown entirely in the shade. So this experiment was a success, but not without caveats.

I planted 8 seed potatoes and as you can see it wasn’t exactly a bumper crop.

So while you can grow potatoes in the shade the crop will be a lot smaller. But if like me, nothing else was going to grow there anyway then why not grow some spuds?

Also, remember that these were grown in complete shade, they never got any direct sunlight.

So if your chosen area gets partial or even just a few hours of direct sunlight a day then you can expect better results than me.

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