Carving a new path

A walkway meandering through your garden provides a number of benefits to you as a gardener and as a lover of beauty. When summer is in full tilt and your garden is finally producing the fruits of your labor, a walkway will provide easy access to the corn, potatoes, onions, carrots and spices you've been waiting for. During this time it also gives you a chance to roam through your flower patch, enjoying the sights and scents that you've put in so many hours for.

When spring comes around next year, a welllaid garden walkway will also keep you out of the mud as you crawl on your hands and knees planting seeds.

Internet blogger Heidi, who manages a blog at Groxie.com, recently finished building a stone walkway with her husband.

"We finished the path, using nearly every rock and stone we had gotten our hands on," she said. "It's not a perfectly-sculpted, totally flat and even path, but I love it. It's the beginning of good things for that ugly backyard, and all it cost us was a few afternoons."

Of course the options for a garden walkway are certainly not limited to stone. Inexpensive choices include wood chips and gravel, while others include tile and brick pavers. Wood chips and gravel require more maintenance, however, as their surfaces tend to shift and change with age. Brick and stone last longer - especially if constructed on a sand or concrete base - but can shift in time if built over the roots of trees. The most durable but time-consuming construction would be tile inlaid into a two-byfour grid.

To begin your construction, pick your path. Curving paths are more pleasing to the eye than straight ones, and a curved design lends itself well to brick, stone, gravel or wood chips. If you're considering tiles and two-by-fours, a straight path is probably your best bet.

To create a curves, mark your path with garden hose, which will keep a more consistent and gradual curve than string or twine will. When you have the curve laid out the way you want, lay a parallel length of hose about three feet away (depending upon how many people you want the path to accommodate at once).

Secondly, you'll need to excavate the ground area. Dig the pathway about five inches deep for brick or stone, assuming your materials are about three inches deep. On the bottom of the excavated path you can lay some landscape fabric to prevent weeds from growing up through the path later. Shovel about two inches of sand over the fabric and tamp and smooth it down. Once this is done, you're ready to lay your bricks.

When laying brick, keep in mind that you may be mowing in this area in the future. If you keep you bricks flush with the ground, you can easily mow right over the top of them. If your bricks sit above ground, however, you're going to have some extra weed-eating to do.

Tile in a two-by-four framework is probably the most professional-looking pathway option. This requires some pretty accurate measurements and a lot more elbow grease, but in the end it's worth it. If you're not entirely sure you can pull it off, call in a professional. Better to pay a little cash for a top-notch pathway than to brag to your friends about how you built the ramshackle contraption leading away from your house.