February, 2nd Week - Paths
Dirty Nails writes from personal experience, having supplied his family of four over the years with enough fresh produce to eat their fill. His book combines his love of gardening with the natural pleasures of being outdoors and 'in amongst it'. The author seeks to de-mystify the art of kitchen and allotment gardening, making the thrills, spills, triumphs and tribulations accessible to all-comers, whatever their level of gardening experience.
PATHS
The wet weather of late has put the kibosh on digging and ground preparation this week. Instead, Dirty Nails has turned his attention to paths in the vegetable garden. Wooden planks are all very well for temporary access to crops, but where regular routes are walked Dirty Nails suggests something more solid.
He likes to construct his paths with old bricks and gathers them wherever he can from skips and dumps. Only unbroken ones will do. Lay them side-by-side across, and set them out as the path will go. Then simply use a spade to dig out two-thirds the depth of the brick, and break up the bottom of the trench. Move the bricks to one side as you do this, and place them back in as you progress with a half-inch (1¼ cm) or so between them. They will settle comfortably in the trench with a stamp of a foot. The spade can be employed to scatter some of the excavated soil onto the bricks, and a piece of wood used to scrape this into the cracks. Then ram it down with a thin edge. Finally, sweep clean.
The structure these paths give to the garden is very pleasing, and they instantly blend in with a look of natural permanence. Walk and wheel-barrow as much as you like, as this all helps the bricks to nestle in. A path constructed thus can be left for years, or shifted with a minimum of fuss and disruption as the garden evolves.
NATURAL HISTORY IN THE GARDEN
Wild Arum
