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A guy planted potatoes in an Amazon box as an experiment. Even he was surprised what happened.

You should see how many potatoes he got out of this experiment.

The Gardening Channel with James Prigioni/YouTube

Can you grow vegetables in a cardboard box?

In the era of supermarkets and wholesale clubs, growing your own food isn't a necessity for most Americans. But that doesn't mean it's not a good idea to try.

A household garden can be a great way to reduce your grocery bill and increase your intake of nutrient-dense foods. It can also be a good source of exercise and a hobby that gets you outside in the sunshine and fresh air more often. However, not everyone has a yard where they can grow a garden or much outdoor space at all where they live. You can plant things in containers, but that requires some upfront investment in planters.

container garden, growing plants in containers, growing vegetables, homegrown, produce Potted plants and herbs can thrive in a container garden. Photo credit: Canva

Or does it? Gardener James Prigioni set out to see if an Amazon shipping box would hold up as a planter for potatoes. He took a basic single-walled Amazon box, lined it with dried leaves to help with moisture retention, added four to five inches of soil (his own homegrown soil he makes), added three dark red seed potatoes, covered them with more soil, added a fertilizer, then watered them.

He also planted a second, smaller Amazon box with two white seed potatoes, following the same steps.

Two weeks later, he had potato plants sprouting. Ten days after that, the boxes were filled with lush plants.

- YouTube youtu.be

Prigioni explained how to "hill" potato plants when they grow tall enough, which helps encourage more tuber growth and protect the growing potatoes from sunlight. Hilling also helps support the plants as they grow taller so they don't flop over. He also added some mulch to help keep the plants cooler as the summer grew hotter.

After hilling, Prigioni only needed to keep up with watering. Both varieties of potatoes flowered, which let him know the tubers were forming. The red potato leaves developed some pest issues, but not bad enough to need intervention, while the white potato plants were unaffected. "It goes to show how variety selection can make a big difference in the garden," he explained.

The visible plants have to start dying before you harvest potatoes, and Prigioni checked in with the boxes themselves when they got to that point.

vegetable garden, growing potatoes, grow potatoes in a cardboard box, Amazon box, farming Freshly harvested potatoes are so satisfying. Photo credit: Canva

"I am pleasantly surprised with how well the boxes held up," he said, especially for being single-walled boxes. The smaller box was completely intact, while the larger box had begun to split in one corner but not enough to affect the plants' growth. "This thing was completely free to grow in, so you can't beat that," he pointed out.

Prigioni predicted that the red potatoes grown in the larger box would be more productive. As he cut open the box and pulled potatoes out, they just kept coming, ultimately yielding several dozen potatoes of various sizes. The smaller box did have a smaller yield, but still impressive just from two potatoes planted in an Amazon box.

People often think they don't have room to grow their own food, which is why Prigioni put these potato boxes on his patio. "A lot of people have an area like this," he said.

"I will never look at cardboard boxes the same," Prigioni added. "There are so many uses for them in the garden and it's just a great free resource we have around, especially if you're ordering stuff from Amazon all the time."

cardboard box, container garden, amazon box, growing vegetables, gardening Do you see boxes or planters?Photo credit: Canva

People loved watching Prigioni's experiment and shared their own joy—and success—in growing potatoes in a similar fashion:

"I have been growing potatoes in every box I can find for several years now. I have had excellent success. I honestly think potatoes prefer cardboard. And yes, most of my boxes were from Amazon."

"I live in an upstairs apartment with a little deck and I have a container garden with containers on every single stair leading to the deck. I grow potatoes in a laundry basket. It's amazing how much food I can get from this type of garden!! Grateful."

"I literally got up and grabbed the empty boxes by our front door, the potatoes that have started to sprout, and soil i had inside and started my planting at 1am. Lol. I will take them outside today and finish. Thank you James!"

"I grew potatoes and tomatoes on my tiny balcony in Germany (in buckets and cardboard boxes). Now I have a big garden here in America. I so love to grow my own food."

"I grew sweet potatoes in cardboard boxes. It’s so much fun."

Prigioni also recently planted the seeds from a tomato he found on his Burger King Whopper, in another fascinating experiment:

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Next time you're stuck with an Amazon box that you don't have a use for, consider whether you could use it as a planter for potatoes or some other edible harvest. Gardening doesn't have to be fancy to be effective.

You can find more of gardening experiments on The Gardening Channel with James Prigioni.

This article originally appeared in April. It has been updated.

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Americans see gardening changes as 'plant hardiness zones' shift across half the U.S.

Here's a quick tool to find out if your zone has changed due to warmer temperatures.

Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash, Map by USDA-ARS and Oregon State University (Public Domain)

The USDA has issued a new Plant Hardiness Zone Map

Millions of American households have a garden of some sort, whether they grow vegetables, fruits, flowers, or other plants. Gardening has always been a popular hobby, but more Americans turned to tending plants during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic for both stress relief and to grow their own food so they could make less trips to the store. For many people, it's a seasonal ritual that's therapeutic and rewarding.

But a shift is occurring in the gardening world. Now, due to rising temperature data, half the country find themselves in a different "plant hardiness zone"—the zones that indicate what plants work well in an area and when to plant them. Gardeners rely on knowing their hardiness zone to determine what to plant and when, but they haven't been updated since 2012.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture updated its Plant Hardiness Zone Map in late 2023, months before people in most of the country start planning their planting. We saw the 10 hottest summers ever recorded in 174 years of climate data between 2014 and 2023, but hardiness zones are actually determined by the coldest winter temperatures each year. Winters are warming at an even faster pace than summers, according to nonpartisan research and communications group Climate Central, but that may or may not be the entire reason behind the zone changes.

The USDA acknowledges that some of the zone shifts could be due to climate change but cautions against using them as hard evidence for it since factors such as improved data collection also contribute to changes in the map.

people planting flowers

Gardening can be a solo or community endeavor.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

"Temperature updates to plant hardiness zones are not necessarily reflective of global climate change because of the highly variable nature of the extreme minimum temperature of the year, as well as the use of increasingly sophisticated mapping methods and the inclusion of data from more weather stations," the USDA wrote in November 2023. "Consequently, map developers involved in the project cautioned against attributing temperature updates made to some zones as reliable and accurate indicators of global climate change (which is usually based on trends in overall average temperatures recorded over long time periods)."

At the same time, Chris Daly, director of the PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University who developed the map with the USDA, told NPR, "Over the long run, we will expect to see a slow shifting northward of zones as climate change takes hold."

As an example of zone shifting, Dallas, Texas, was classified as Zone 8a in 2012, when data showed the coldest winter temperature in the city was between 10 and 15 degrees Fahrenheit on average. In 2023, with data showing the coldest winter temps falling between 15 and 20 degrees Fahrenheit, it's been shifted to Zone 8b.

Some zone shifts resulted in moving to an entirely new zone number, such as Seattle shifting from Zone 8b to Zone 9a. The overall trend was for zones to be pushed northward, but not all areas saw a shift. NPR has a helpful tool here in which you can enter your zip code, see what zone your city was previously in, what zone it's in now, and the temperature changes that caused the shift.

The bottom line is if you have a gardening book with a hardiness zones map printed before 2024, it's time for an updated map, or check online to see what zone you fall in now to give your garden the best chance of thriving this year.


This article originally appeared last year.

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Family

Mom shares simple-but-genius hack for getting kids to try new foods and eat their veggies

"They have discovered they love radishes, bell peppers, salami, cheeses, spicy things, sour things…"

Photo by cottonbro studio

Kids can be finicky eaters.

One of the responsibilities of parenting is making sure our kids are fed nutritious foods. Unfortunately, our kids are not always on board with that idea.

Children's finickiness ranges anywhere from will-eat-anything to will-only-eat-chicken-nuggets and everything in between. Picky eating poses a challenge for parents who want their kids to have balanced, nutritional diet, and all too often it turns into a battle of wills. Unfortunately, food battles can create negative associations with eating and mealtimes, which nobody wants. We do want our kids to try new foods and to learn to enjoy healthy eating, however. So how do we do that?

X user Jeff Thompson posed the question: "Kids picky about food…what’s the strategy to get them to try new things?" and people weighed in with their advice. But one response in particular struck a chord both for its simplicity and effectiveness.

Bethany Babcock wrote, "Ok I actually have a great tip for this. Movie nights the kids get a 'snack plate' for dinner. Like a blend of a charcuterie board and veggie and fruit tray. I put all their favorites and sneak in new foods. All arranged super cute."

"It’s the only time I’m full on Pinterest mom," she added.

She explained that the snacking continues as the movie plays and that the dim lights and semi-distracted state leads the kids to try everything that's on their plate. "The new foods go last but eventually everything is gone," Babcock wrote.

She said she gives them dipping sauces like hummus and dressings to dunk their healthy finger foods in. "The key is to put it all one one big board. The kids eat fast trying things because they are afraid someone else will and they will miss out. They have discovered they love radishes, bell peppers, salami, cheeses, spicy things, sour things…" she shared.

Babcock also shared a photo of how she started with the snack plate idea when her kids were toddlers, opening their "boxes" like they were a surprise.

Some people might take issue with the "mindless eating" aspect of munching in front of a movie, but when the munchies are healthy it's a great way to semi-fool kids into trying something they normally might scoff at. According to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, it can take between eight and 15 tries before a child will accept a new food, but parents often give up after a few attempts. The more opportunities you can find to get kids to taste something, the better.

Of course, there are some foods people just don't like regardless of their age, so if a child has tasted something many many times and still doesn't like it, no need to force it. There's a big, wide world of healthy food options out there, and leaning into the variety and the fun of exploring new foods helps kids expand their palate without the battle.

As KidsHealth.org points out, parents are the ones who control the food offerings, so the key is to provide a range of healthy foods in the home and then encourage kids to explore what's offered. If a little dim lighting and movie distraction helps them do that, all the better.

No need to duke it out with kids to get them to eat their veggies or protein or whatever it is you want them to eat. Just keep offering healthy options, make the food attractive, create a relaxed atmosphere around eating and most kids will inevitably come around to trying almost anything you put in front of them.

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Woman declared peas the 'nastiest' vegetable, and people chimed in with their veggie beefs

Brussels sprouts are really just misunderstood.

Dean Xavier/Unsplash/@DestiniUmajje/Twitter

A Twitter thread declared peas to be the "nastiest vegetable."

Everyone has that one vegetable that turns them into a sneering 3-year-old. You know what I mean. The one you straight-up refuse to eat and if it was the only food available to you, you'd rather starve then let it touch your lips. Some people just can't get behind spinach and apparently a lot of people dislike turnips, others will say Brussels sprouts are the absolute worst. One woman on Twitter declared that peas are the "nastiest" vegetable, and while some people agreed with her, others chimed in to give their opinions.

For some of us, our distaste for certain veggies is something concrete, like a traumatic memory. Maybe when you were a kid, you had them prepared a particular way and it soured you on the veggie for the rest of your life. Or it could be an aesthetic choice—some vegetables taste delicious but don't look it. You do eat with your eyes first, after all. For others, there's the issue of taste. Some people simply can't eat a vegetable because it tastes terrible to them.


In 2019, scientists revealed that there are people called "super-tasters" who have a genetic predisposition to taste food differently than others. For super-tasters, leafy dark green veggies like broccoli, Brussels and cabbage taste extremely bitter and unappetizing. According to a CNN article on the subject, people with this "bitter" gene are 2.6 times more likely to not eat as many vegetables in general because of the bitter taste of others.

“So that [bitter] vegetable is disliked, and because people generalize, soon all vegetables are disliked,” Valerie Duffy, a University of Connecticut professor and expert in the study of food and taste, told CNN. “If you ask people, ‘Do you like vegetables?’ They don’t usually say, ‘Oh yeah, I don’t like this, but I like these others.’ People tend to either like vegetables or not.”

When user DES made her declaration, the responses were swift.

But for all the veggie haters out there, there are people who'll come to their defense as well.

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