[An earlier version of this article was originally published on our old-style web site in January 2008]

Looking out of the window from my desk I can see the gravel paths that I laid three years ago to make it easier to move around the raised beds of the vegetable garden. In recent months we’ve had our share of wild weather, driving sleet and rain, but there is not now a single patch of mud or even slippery grass on the way from the kitchen door to the greenhouse.

Paths also provide a surface on which to transport garden materials and tools. It is much easier to run a wheelbarrow or trolley along a firm walkway. Putting in good pathways around a garden adds greatly to the months during which we are able to enjoy the garden, and makes it so much easier to get around. The investment of effort and cost brings considerable returns in terms of both convenience and appearance.

Quite apart from ease of access paths can also enhance the appearance of a garden by adding a border that will set off the plants. If suitably designed they can also provide drainage channels to redirect water away from areas that could become waterlogged, thereby damaging plants that don’t like their roots to be drowned, and towards areas where you want the increased moisture levels.

Personally I like gravel paths. It is, of course, possible to be very sophisticated in constructing these with base layers to give solidity, but most of mine were simply dug out as channels three to four inches deep (incidentally supplying a store of top soil for use elsewhere in the garden) stamped firmly down and leveled, covered in a water-permeable but weed-proof membrane and then filled with small gravel pebbles.

Paving slabs can be used for paths, but unlike pebble paths which are easily leveled by raking them over and therefore don’t need a lot of careful preparation, the substrate for paved paths must be thoroughly prepared or it won’t be long before you have them rocking in all directions and needing to be taken up and re-laid. However, when well done they are a long-lasting solution, and if extended to cover a larger area they cut down the grass cutting so disliked by many people and can provide firm base for garden furniture.

Returning to the subject of drainage, remember that large paved areas need somewhere for the rainwater to go in a downpour. Have you sloped it so that it will direct a flood into the foundations of your house? Not a good idea! To lobby again for my gravel paths, another advantage is that they allow more or less natural drainage access to the earth beneath. Anything more solid needs supplementary drainage channels.

My kitchen garden gravel paths

Many people will go to great expense to ensure that the materials are bright and new. For myself, I prefer things to look a little battered and worn, so apart from gravel I like the weathered appearance of second hand bricks which go well with weathered timber structures.

An important issue is garden safety. Paths can increase safety, but they can also give rise to their own set of risks. If you’re using bricks or paving slabs, make sure there’s nowhere to trip. Check and recheck that they’re level, and don’t wobble. Again, I prefer my gravel. It doesn’t have raised edges.

Tags: garden path, garden paving, garden project, garden safety, gravel path, path, paving slab, pebble path

Last Autumn I wrote an article under the title, This Year’s Leaves … Next Year’s Mulch, which was well-received by a lot of people.  It came back to mind today so I thought I’d follow it up.

This past year has not been a good gardening year for me.  Firstly a long period of indifferent health kept me away from anything very energetic, then a plague of apparently insecticide-resistant white fly followed by blight decimated much of what I had managed to grow, both vegetables and flowers.  I have not even been keeping this blog very much alive.

One thing that did grow well, however, was the harvest of leaves from both our own trees and the neighbouring churchyard.  Although that does at this time of year generate something of a chore, clearing them away from the lawn and the borders, there is a silver lining to the cloud.  As last year’s title put it, this year’s leaves can become next year’s mulch.  At least, they can!  It all depends on a bit of effort now.

Leaves left at their full size will often (depending on the local climate) take two or three years to fully degrade to give a nice mulch, and I’m not satisfied that last year’s are yet quite ready.  The process can be speeded, however, by shredding them.  I do own a leaf blower and vacuum but that also has succumbed to some dread disease.  Once again its engine won’t start. So today I raked leaves into piles, got out the lawn mower, raised its blades to their highest position and used it as a vacuum cleaner, “hoovering” up the piles of leaves.  Last year I manage to run out of petrol at this stage, but this year all went well.

Leaves compact into much less space when they’re shredded but I decided today that after the first run they were not small enough so created two heaps of the shredded material and ran the mower over them again.  So now I have a still smaller heap of more finely chopped leaf, now safely transferred to my leaf mould bin - actually just a wooden frame surrounded by chicken wire to stop everything from blowing way.

Next year at this time I should have a really good heap of mulch to spread on the borders.  Don’t waste those leaves by dumping or burning them.  Mulch them.

Tags: autumn garden, compost, leaf mold, leaf mould

I’ve recently started a gossipy blog specifically about lawn mowers - or should that be lawnmowers? The development of the English language over time, and in places separated by large geographical distances, is a fascinating subject in itself. My reason for including an article there on the difference between the two terms is more than mere pedantry or English nationalism. It’s very practical because if a web page or blog post is to have any chance of being seen by large numbers of people it needs its major terms to be in a form that most people might enter into Google or Yahoo!

I’ll leave you to read the article on lawnmowers.for-us-all.co.uk rather than repeating it here, except to say that there are significant differences in the words between the two sides of the Atlantic. In this respect as in many others English English and American English are drifting apart.

Anyway, whatever the spelling and word construction, mowing the lawn is an important aspect of gardening for many people. My latest piece over there on the lawnmower site is about environmental responsibility in mowing the lawn. I willingly admit to a degree of hypocrisy as I have written in praise of manual and cordless electric mowers when I myself still use my Honda Izy petrol powered model. Economics and practicality in this case conspire against any short-term improvement as my lawns don’t lend themselves to a manual mower and my bank manager might not approve of a fancy new cordless lithium battery model. Maybe one day!

Enjoy the lawn mowing this weekend.

- David -

Tags: lawn mower, lawnmower

For the past several years I’ve had very little success with butternut squash, but courgettes have been very different. Both green and yellow varieties have added to our kitchen table year after year.

This year I was rather late getting to grips with the greenhouse and vegetable garden due to a period of poor health, but eventually dug around to see what seed packets I had in store. I didn’t find any green courgette seeds but did discover a three-year-old almost empty packet (just four seeds) of the golden yellow variety, Golden Dawn III F1, dated 2005 and to be sown by last year

Not sure whether they’d germinate or not, I put one each in four small and even-older peat pots filled with general purpose compost, watered them liberally and left them in a shady corner of the greenhouse to see what happened. All four are now thriving as rapidly developing seedlings and last night I put them in the ground outside.

For each plant I had dug an 18-inch deep hole, put a layer kitchen waste (straight from the kitchen composting bin) in the bottom, covered this with a layer of well-rotted farmyard manure, covered that with a layer of shredded paper, and then backfilled the hole with a mixture of one part manure to two parts of the soil taken out when digging the hole. So from last night my four courgette plants, about three feet apart to give them a fair amount of room, are luxuriating in a nutritious soil which I hope will lead to another great harvest.

We still have a slight risk of late frost here in mid-May, but I’ll have to put a bit of fleece over them if the weather forecast looks threatening.

Happy growing,

- David -

Tags: Courgettes

Hello again,

Since last writing here there have been a number of additions to our rapidly increasing mix of gardening resources on the web, and I thought this morning that it was time I listed them here.

On the main Gardening-Notes site there are three new gardening articles:

Fuchsias in Great Variety - a response from a fuchsia enthusiast (myself) to people who claim that fuchsias are boring because they’re “all the same”

Garden Paths - a concise look at the benefits from having good paths around your garden

Safety in the Garden - an important topic, especially as most accidents to individuals happen in home and garden; without becoming paranoid and chasing after an illusory risk-free environment it makes good sense to minimise the dangers which inevitably lurk in our gardens.

Returning to the subject of fuchsias, further varieties and photographs are gradually being added to our new specialist site on fuchsias: the-fuchsia-file. As I think I said in a previous posting on this blog, I did wonder whether to hold this site back until it was in a more finished form, but decided rather to let it grow and develop while on public display. Take a look at what we have so far. By the way, I am still very enthusiastic about the Thompson & Morgan DVD on fuchsias which was given to me by a friend as a Christmas present.

Finally, I’ve revised the UK Garden Magazines page on our BrunleaBooks site, and the US magazines page is almost ready for launch.

That’s all for today,

- David -

It’s Monday evening. With my responsibilities as a church elder and lay preacher I can’t say that the typical Sunday is anything like a “day of rest”, so when at all possible I take Monday off to relax. It’s one of the advantages of being self-employed, although today I’m not sure that “relaxation” is quite the word.

Looking out of the window this morning I realised that although I’d cleared the leaves off the lawn a week ago it was again more than ankle deep in places. The leaf blower is out of action so out from the garden shed came the lawn mower. I set the blades as high as they’d go, as I didn’t want to cut the grass again at this time of year, and started to “hoover” up the leaves down the long grassy avenue of trees which runs to the road from the main body of our garden along the full length of the fence dividing us from our neighbour, the village churchyard. We have trees on both sides, ours to the right and the churchyard trees to the left, and so an enormous volume of leaves.

I’d scarcely started when “chug, chug … chug ….. chug” and the motor stopped. Out of petrol! After a cup of coffee I thought, “No, I don’t feel like going for petrol; I’ll do it the old way; I’ll sweep the leaves.” Hard work, yes! But I suppose it will have done me good to use muscle instead of brain for a while.

The other, longer-term benefit of this strenuous activity will be seen in about a year’s time when I can use the mulch from the composted leaves. I decided that I needed a bigger place to compost the leaves this year, so back to the garden shed for the reel of wire netting which has been sitting there for a year or two waiting for some constructive use, and now I’ve got an eight foot long leaf mould “bin” with netting walls and three quarters full of leaves, with more still to fall. It really doesn’t make sense to waste the leaves and lose all the lovely leaf mould that should now be produced over the coming year.

More on leaf mould at www.gardening-notes.com/articles/ .

Tags: compost, leaf mold, leaf mould, leaves, mulch

As I sit at my desk typing I can look out of the window at my vegetable plot, its raised beds and greenhouse - at the moment with a brown blizzard of leaves falling in the breeze from the horse-chestnuts . The part that I want to mention specially now is, however, just out of sight unless I lean to my left and look out at an angle. It’s the cold frame. I built it two years ago using 8-foot lengths of 6″x1″ timber and two old glazed window frames for the lid. It has served me well.

One shortcoming, though, has been its lack of insulation … until this past weekend. I managed to lay my hands on several 8ft x 4ft slabs of 2-inch thick polystyrene foam, cut in half into 4ft x 4ft pieces for ease of transport in the back of the car. They were intended originally to go in the greenhouse as internal winter walls, but there was some spare.

Cutting it to the right dimensions was quite an easy task. My old Swiss army knife came in useful once again along with a 3-metre steel rule. A cut about an inch deep across a slab, followed by a sharp snapping motion, gave clean straight edges and the sheets fit nicely between the 3″x3″ uprights of the frame.

Of course, the transparent top is not double or triple glazed, so some additional insulation was needed there, and a double layer of transparent bubble wrap worked wonders. I fixed it to the under sides of the two window frames using a staple gun and a technique I’ve used previously with good results - cutting 6-inch plastic plant labels into shorter pieces and using them as “washers”, stapling through the plastic strip into the bubble film and the wooden frame (see above); this avoids the problem of the metal staples cutting right through the thin polythene and allowing it to float free.

So, I’ve now got a freshly insulated frame, and into it very shortly will go a lot of the potted plants which are hardy enough to survive our typical English-Midlands winter under cover but not fully out of doors.

For more on preparing the garden for winter see www.gardening-notes.com/articles/autumn.html