This raised bed was one that took some filling, it was the last in the flight and at the bottom. There seemed to be nothing to fill it with when I levelled the path. So over a couple of years it received all the clumps of weeds, spent potting compost, turf etc. Then last year I hacked the weeds down covered it in a bit of black poly and left it until spring. My thoughts were to clean it up this season and so planted some pink fir apple potatoes in it as they are strong growing and make a good weed suppressing canopy. If you don't know them they are an old (Victorian I think) variety which are nearly as knobbly as a Jerusalem Artichoke, but have the most delightful 'new potato' flavour, which they keep even in storage.
As seen in this picture they tend to be long and thin rather than the more usual potato shape of round - oval.
What interested me is how productive this bed has proved to be. No compost was added, just the odds and ends I mentioned above. Furthermore it's produced a very good loamy soil, nicely opened up by digging the potatoes.
These spuds had to be dug as they had gone down with the blight (one of the drawbacks of Pink Fir Apple), but even so produced a decent crop.The picture shows the crop from half the bed, the total crop will be enough to satisfy our craving for 'new potatoes' through the winter months.
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