ENJOY YOUR GARDEN PATH & THE INEVITABLE MAINTENANCE

Sometimes I am tempted to create more gardens (which I absolutely do not need) simply to create more garden paths. I don’t know why I have a love affair with paths, but I collect pictures of them and ideas for future paths with the same zeal that I collect garden ideas.

My tastes in paths are nondiscriminatory. I love them whether they are made from flagstone, brick, gravel, wood, grass and sometimes concrete. And I particularly like paths that are featured multiple materials. What I’m finding, though, is that other than those made of a solid surface, paths all need maintenance. And the more material mixing you do, the more maintenance they need.

Few kinds of paths have my heart like flagstone paths. I’m particularly a fan of flagstone with moss or another durable, “steppable” ground cover growing between the rocks. In one of the early iterations of the path to the garage (which back then was just a path through the garden opening onto the lawn), I tried this and year after year the ground cover failed. I tried Irish moss, creeping thyme and a handful of other plants and although all of them would thrive in summer, none could handle what our Wisconsin winter had in store for them. That’s really no surprise as we were asking for a Herculean effort from them. This was a path that was regularly trod upon (i.e compaction is a factor), shoveled (no plant wants that) and frozen and thawed (the stones would heat up in the winter sun) repeatedly. 

This is the area of the path that I've already cleaned up this year. Blissfully weed free.

When I extended the path all the way to the garage a few years ago as part of a complete renovation of that part of the yard following the renovation of our house, I embraced a new design: The same flagstones (although mixed with recycled bluestone from my grandmother’s house) with small gravel between the stones. I laid a thick base of limestone screenings (also called road base in some places), set the stones on it and filled in with gravel (you can read about the process here and see what it looked like right after I finished it here). 

Up until now, the maintenance has consisted of just topping off the gravel from time to time and using my weed torch to knock out any small weeds that might pop up. This year, however, the weeds have been healthier and I was somewhat lax about keeping up with frequent weed burning missions. Weed burners are fabulous for a lot of applications, but they work best when you are killing small weeds frequently, rather than trying to take out well-established plants. 

When I resigned myself a few weekends ago to take on the path maintenance project I’ve been putting off for months and started trying to hand pull weeds, I found that the reason they were all growing so well is because there was a lot of soil in all that gravel. And that is the issue with so many paths. Even when you take care to prevent weeds from growing in cracks, dirt gets in there and then you’ve lost the battle.

The areas that I haven't gotten to yet are not nearly so nice. Grass, both from the lawn and nearby ornamental grasses, dandelions and all manor of other weeds have taken a firm hold in what used to be gravel but is now mostly soil.

And as far as I can tell, there is no way to prevent this. Landscape fabric certainly doesn’t work because soil just gathers on top of it. It gets there by wind, messy gardening, blown in by the lawn mower, but mostly, I’m guessing, from plant material getting on the path and breaking down. In other words, it’s basically making compost. 

The story of what happened next with my path isn’t particularly exciting or illuminating, and it’s certainly no “Quick tip for path maintenance.” I flipped up every stone, dug up the all of the gravel/soil mixture surrounding it and reset it (which wasn’t difficult as the limestone screening base seems as good as ever). Then I came back and refilled the cracks. Fortunately we got way too much gravel delivered when I did the paths in the circle garden this spring so I had plenty left. 

I should clarify. I’m only about halfway through this project. It’s boring and laborious, so I’ve been taking it in chunks and hope to finish it up before the end of the month. 

But here are my takeaways about garden paths:

1. Unless it's a solid surface, such as poured or stamped concrete, all paths will require maintenance, and even those will probably need power washing once or twice a year.
2. If you do have a path that requires maintenance, do a little bit frequently, rather than waiting until it becomes a big project. Staying on top of my weed burning could have put this big job off a year or more.
3. Consider your climate and how frequently you'll use the path when you decide what material to use. Maintenance is one thing but completely redoing a path is expensive and time consuming.

If you're curious about my weed torch, which is one of my favorite ways to tackle weeds, here's the setup I use. These are links to the products on Amazon and if you buy from them I may receive a small commission to help support my plant habit! Thanks for your support.

WRAPPING UP A GARDEN PROJECT FOR FALL

Work on the oval circle garden continued this weekend and by the end of the day on Sunday I let out  a sigh of relief. If a blizzard came tomorrow (unlikely as we've not yet had a frost), I'd be OK with how far this project got this season.

On Saturday I reset the outer circle of cobblestones. One thing I had not expected was for them not to fit perfectly. This, of course, was a ridiculous notion, but until I set the first segment it had never even occurred to me that the math wouldn't work out for me to only be able to use whole cobblestones. This was a bit of a predicament as a half-hearted attempt to split one using a small chisel and a light hammer left me frustrated and suffering from very sore wrists. I only needed two pieces so I just left the holes and planned to deal with it later.

On Sunday I got a truckload of paver base. The place I got it from called it limestone screenings, other places call it paver base or road base and in some places in the country its stone dust. I think the difference is primarily the type of stone it comes from and here we have lots of limestone. In any case, it's a coarse sandlike material with tiny bits of stone in it that compacts nicely. The first time I used limestone screenings for a small path ages ago, I was convinced it had made the soil around it extremely alkaline and therefore inhospitable to most plants. That didn't work for that application because I has put it under flagstones, filled in the gaps with soil and tried to grow groundcover between the stones. As one plant after another failed there, I realized it was probably the limestone base.

Fortunately, since the path will be completely separate from the soil, held at bay by metal edging and cobblestones, I shouldn't have to worry about that effect on plants.

After dumping the base in the paths, I tamped the entire thing down. Then I wet it and let the water filter through before going back and filling in low areas with more base. I could have used a little more base but with one cubic yard of the stuff weighing about 1.2 tons and me borrowing a half-ton truck, I wasn't able to get as much as I would have liked. Once I had it smoothed and leveled by eye (since this is going to be topped with gravel it doesn't need to be perfectly level like it would have to be if I were setting stone on top it), I tamped it again, wet it down again and then walked away.

While I was at the nursery getting the base I found two broken cobbles that I figured I could put in the holes where I had gaps. They aren't a perfect fit, but I think once the cobbles get some age on them they'll blend in. And if they don't I can always change them out later and I'm only out the $1 they charged me for them.

Originally I was going to get the gravel this fall as well, but I've rethought that. Since I  might be a little light on paver base, I'm going to let it settle and compact over the winter and then decide in spring if I should add more base or just top it up with all gravel. There's a significant cost difference: the paver base was $20 a ton and the gravel is $100 per ton. The other advantage to waiting on the gravel is that I don't have to worry about soil or seeds ending up in it and I can start next spring with clean and completely weed-free paths. In fact, I may wait to put the gravel in until after I plant the beds as there's sure to be some soil flying about.

Since this project is almost wrapped up for the season, here's a quick look at what's been done.

This is what the garden, the first I'd ever made from scratch (14 years ago now) looked like at its best.  You'd notice it was nothing special even then.

It's a little easier to get a feel for the positioning and layout of the garden from Google Earth.

Here's a rough design concept for the renovated garden.

The first step was to move out the plants. I moved what I was keeping but was not returning to the garden and clustered all the chives for the chive hedge together where they will overwinter and I'll replant them in spring.

Then Mr. Much More Patient and I spent some quality time arguing about math as we laid out the location for the paths. I reviewed the serious mistakes I made when I designed the paths originally and ripped out all the dreaded landscape fabric.

Then I was left to do a little light digging.

With the paths dug, we installed the metal edging for each "spoke."

And that led to where it is now.

That means that the only thing left to do this fall is to level out the heaps of soil. And then the fun begins. I can't wait to really get stuck in to the planting plan. What a great way to spend a cold winter day.

THE PATH-MAKING MISTAKES I MADE THAT YOU SHOULDN'T

One thing that can be said for sort of tedious gardening tasks such as weeding or moving mass quantities of soil is that it gives you a lot of time to think. And over the last several weekends of working in the oval circle garden I've spent a lot of time reflecting on the mistakes I made there.

It was the first garden I designed from scratch so I give myself a big pass on a lot of things that went wrong there. It was also the first time I built paths, and more than anything else that I've learned from my mistakes in that garden, I learned a lot about how not to build paths.

So I'm going to save you from the anguish of a poorly constructed garden path and tell you exactly what you SHOULDN'T do.

The oval circle garden was cursed with poor design decisions from the get-go. The 16-paths were way too small and oddly curved when they didn't need to be.

1. DON'T SKIMP ON THE SIZE

This is a relatively small garden and when I created it, I was concerned I wouldn't have enough room for plants, so downsized the paths, to a paltry 16 inches wide. I suspect that I was also trying to save some money on the hardscaping. In general, a path meant for one person should be a minimum of 24 inches wide. If two people are meant to walk together or it's a longer path, go wider: 4 feet at a minimum.

Skinny paths not only just feel wrong, they also look wrong and nothing else will feel right when the hardscaping sets the wrong tone.

2. DON'T CURVE FOR NO REASON
I'm a sucker for meandering curves on a path, but they should make sense. The path should curve because it has to to get around an obstruction. When I made the path to the garage, I installed gardens that forced the path to curve, which might be cheating, but it's a chicken and egg thing. When I did the paths in the original oval circle garden, I thought that curved paths would keep it from being too formal. For two of the three, it worked, partly because the curve was gentle enough that you could still walk straight. But the third path had an odd, too-sharp curve in it that was all wrong.

This is the remnants of the landscape fabric I pulled out of the garden. Yuck.

3. NEVER, EVER USE LANDSCAPE FABRIC

Some people are going to think this advice is crazy. In fact, the internet thinks this advice is crazy. If you do a Google search for how to build a path, nine times out of 10, the instructions will tell you to put down landscaping fabric. And yet, many landscape professionals never put it down.

Landscape fabric is great for a year, maybe two. You'll be applauding how well it has kept weeds out of your paths. But paths, especially gravel paths, get dirty. Soil falls in, blows in or is tracked in and then is trapped on top of the fabric. This creates an environment that is very hospitable to nasty little weed seeds, which sprout. And unless you are a gardener out there every other day on your hands and knees pulling all these little sprouts (you're not), they get away from you. And then they send down roots THROUGH the landscape fabric, which makes it impossible to pull them out. Worse yet, it has a way of emerging in places you don't want it to.

A wild violet was one of many weeds embedded in the landscape fabric when I pulled it out. The roots extended underneath and were also intertwined in the fabric itself. DON'T DO IT!

Then, when you finally decide you just want to get rid of the damn fabric, you can't pull it up because you've got gravel or stone on top of it.

For the new paths, I plan to take the same approach that I did when I built the path to the garage. I'll lay down a couple inches of compacted paver base (finally crushed stone), which is in itself an inhospitable place for anything to grow. Then I'll lay down a couple inches of gravel on top of it. Yes, soil will still get in there, but when weeds do show up, I'll be able to dig them out properly, or, even better, hit them with the weed torch with no fear of lighting a giant chunk of landscape fabric on which I may be standing on fire.

Friends don't let friends use landscape fabric. Be a good friend.

Once I removed most of the pea gravel, the metal edging was still in place, but you can see that the soil was backfilled right up to the top edge of it. This just meant more soil crept over the edge into the gravel. 

4. DON'T DISRESPECT YOUR EDGES
When I made the paths on this garden the first time, I installed metal edging, although this same mistake can be made with every other kind of edging. Back then, I backfilled soil right up to the top of the edging. Then, on the other side, I backfilled gravel damn near to the top. As you can imagine, there was plenty of soil that ended up in the gravel and vice versa. Keep materials below the top of edging to make sure they stay where they should.

With the gravel dug out, even though I backfilled too high on the metal edging, 13 or more years after I installed the metal edging, you can see that it was still doing it's job (there's still some on the right side of the path) before I pulled it out.

AND ONE DO

There are a lot of options for edging materials to divide a path from the grass or a garden, but I've been thrilled with how metal edging has worked out. Generally, I prefer steel over aluminum and a 4-inch tall edge over a less expensive 3-inch edge. It can make a perfectly straight path or a curved path with no breaks. Because it is so thin, dark colors such as black and brown blend in well. Unfinished steel edging will gradually rust which is a lovely affect as well.

Of course this comes at a price. It's not cheap and shipping can cost more than the edging itself. I was all set to order this edging until I found out it would cost about $150 (more than the cost of the edging) to get to my house. Fortunately it turns out that Lowe's has the same edging in a slightly shorter size so I can drive to store and get it.

Even though it's not cheap, at least when compared to plastic edging (no, no, no) or bender board, it's still on par with or less than any kind of stone treatment. And it's certainly easier and faster to install, all of which makes using metal edging a big DO for me.