Mulching the taters

I have planted the spuds and ridged them up, so that the tubers are buried deeply and now i want to build a thick mulch layer on top. The point of the mulch of course is that it will be well rotten when we come to harvest so all that goodness will be dug into teh ground when we harvest. It should suppress any surface weeds and keep the ground nice and moist - thats is the chooks don't scratch it all off, which is a high probability.

I am using last years half rotted bracken, should do the job nicely. Of course in the old days before all that mechanically produced straw was available, bracken was used a lot for animal bedding. It breaks down well under the hoofs of the animals and all that manure as well makes a rich potash rich compost. This would have been the main foeeding up for the domestic veg beds, so it feels approprite for us to do the same