Lazy bed

Lazy bed (Irish: ainneor or iompú; Scottish Gaelic: feannagan [ˈfjan̪ˠakən]; Faroese: letivelta) is a traditional method of arable cultivation, often used for potatoes. Rather like cord rig cultivation, parallel banks of ridge and furrow are dug by spade although lazy beds have banks that are bigger, up to 2.5 metres (8 ft 2 in) in width, with narrow drainage channels between them. The 1874 Canadian Farmer's Manual of Agriculture notes:

A common mode practised in Ireland, and in some parts of the north and west of England and Scotland, is that known as the lazy-bed fashion, which consists in planting the sets in beds of a few feet in width, covered from trenches formed with the spade.^[1]

In addition to Ireland, England, and Scotland, the practice has been documented in Newfoundland, St. Pierre, the Faroe Islands, the Swiss Alps,^[2] Devon,^[3] Orkney,^[4] and the Isle of Man.^[5] One early-20th-century critique of the practise suggests it could lead to overcrowding of plantings.^[6] Another critic wrote that the "system is too laborious and expensive to adopt except in wet districts."^[7] In the Hebrides and the west of Ireland, the method used is normally to lift up sods of peat and apply desalinated seaweed fertiliser to improve the ground.^{[citation needed]} In Newfoundland, lazy beds were augmented with seaweed,^[2] a process which continues into the early 21st century:

One method of applying seaweed is to spread it on a bed and cover it with soil from the trench. This method sometimes referred to as the 'lazy bed' system works well, especially in areas where the soil is shallow and drainage is poor.^[8]