Potatoes in containers - can you increase the yield?

Some activities are just plain bizarre. And growing potatoes in containers, when you have a perfectly good vegetable patch, seems like one of them. Especially as they have less space to grow and need more watering.

So, when my husband came home with two packs of these Haxnicks' potato planters (pictured) I had to bite my tongue. No point in discouraging food production, even on a bijou scale.

But would it be bijou? Floating around the Internet is the suggestion that if you earth up a potato plant well enough, it will send off more potato-producing shoots, or stolons, and you’ll get a much bigger harvest, distributed throughout the container.

The idea seems to stem (hah, sorry!) from a piece in The Seattle Times. In 2005 Greg Lutovsky was quoted as saying that, when growing potatoes in a box, you could “steal” the tubers from the bottom of the box (removing the bottom slats, then replacing them) throughout the season. “Unless you steal all of them during the growing season, in the fall you should end up with a box of spuds—as much as 100 lbs.”