My idea of a garden does not include a lawn. Thus moving from here to there requires paths. How wide should the paths be? To edge or not to edge? Gravel (crushed or pea), pavers (natural or concrete), wood chips - what should the paths be made of? I had a basic idea of where the paths should go in my sketched out plan. According to the literature, a garden path should be no narrower than 3 feet and should by all accounts be wider. While the garden is much larger than our previous garden, it still seemed like a four foot path would take up an awful lot of room. I could not see making them any wider than 3 feet so that is what they are. I ended up with 297 feet of paths on one side of the garden alone. Trying to figure out what edging material to use and then looking at the cost, keeping in mind a path has two sides, was keeping me from moving forward so I just decided I would not use edging. We chose to use 1/4 minus gravel for the paths on the south side. This makes a very firm base, won't roll down hill like pea gravel and is relatively affordable. If we decide to use a different paving material in the future, there will already be a good base in place. Wood chips are free so we decided to use those on the north side.
I walked out the front door and started at the beginning where the front gate would open into the garden. Using a scrap of fence lumber that measured 36 inches long as my guide, I excavated the soil down to the harder clay layer - about 6 - 8 inches. Part of the path system is lined with newspaper and part with landscape fabric. We'll see which works better. Then it was a matter of using the wheelbarrow to move the gravel into place.
This is a picture of the raised beds that I will say more about later, but it also shows the woodchip path. The same method was used to make these paths as the gravel ones.
