Kitchen Garden Paths

Long planned, but never accomplished: since building the vegetable and fruit beds (during 2010, with the last vegetable bed completed March 2011), the paths have been left as grass. The buttercups, dandelions, and grass growing along them have made the paths difficult during the late summer, and the mud has been awful when it's wet (which is, frankly, often).

We quite quickly established that we needed to put down weed-suppressant membrane and chippings, in order to help with both of these problems—and then promptly spent two years bemoaning not getting round to it.

I said, last August, that we hoped to get round to the paths, intending at the time to get it done during our usually productive autumn phase of work, which didn't happen (I think the wood shelter and hillside intervened, probably reasonably).

But lo! We've got it done. Taking advantage of the warm and dry weather, we decided we had to get it done before it got wet (it'd be a horribly muddy job, if the ground's sodden, à la the hillside trenches). I bought a mattock head for the pick-axe a couple of weeks ago, hoping that it would make this sort of work easier, and it's worked really well for cutting the banked sides of the paths off, so that the ground's more level. It's incredible how much soil has built up against the raised beds, which must have furrowed out from the path centre (where the wheelbarrow tracks, I suppose).

The paths cleared, we then worked along wedging woven weed suppressing fabric along all the paths (we ran out of woven stuff with the two shortest paths left (between the bottom raspberry bed and the two beds to either side), but they're the lowest-traffic paths (hence leaving them 'til last, as I knew we weren't flush with membrane!). They've been done with the slightly less tough non-woven fabric (which I used under the woodshelter), which I think will cope with the low wear, though I wanted the polypropylene woven material for the main tracks.

We probably don't have enough chippings to cover the paths, but that's 'easily' sorted, as we can order a truckload as soon as the drive's clear.

That was the other part of the weekend's work, splitting a couple of tons of wood. The driveway is, therefore, rather more clear.

Lastly, we planted a delphinium (picked up cheap last week while buying the border tools), astrantia, aquilegia, and three schizostylis that we bought earlier in the year. They've all been in pots, but there were clear spaces in the long border, so in they went. The border tools have proved useful!

In other news: on Friday I started a batch of 'Harvest Mild' beer and chardonnay, both from kits. They both claim to only take a few weeks, which is, I suppose, plausible if it stays warm.