How to Garden With Paths

Build garden paths to protect both plants and your shoes.

Adding permanent paths and fixed beds in your garden space provides numerous benefits to future crops. Whether gardening fruits, vegetables, ornamental grasses or flowers, building paths allows gardeners to more easily get to their plants for maintenance and harvesting. Additionally, building permanent beds and pathways in the garden prevents the soil in garden spaces from compacting under foot traffic. Adding paths to a new or existing garden is an effortless project for both experienced and amateur gardeners.

Difficulty:

Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Paving materials
• Edging materials
• Compost or manure
• Manual or mechanic garden tiller
• Landscape fabric (optional)

1. Diagram how you intend to lay out each garden bed and path. For vegetable and fruit gardening, you want to ensure that you keep beds between 3 and 4 feet wide for easy access to the middle of the beds. Choosing the garden crop and bed sizes allows you to better diagram the placement of paths.

2. Determine a size for garden pathways to aid in diagramming and excavating the path locations. You may need to consider wider paths for community and handicap accessible gardens. To allow for wheelchairs to pass, you need paths to measure at least 5 feet wide. For home gardens, paths should measure at least 2 to 3 feet wide to allow for the use of wheelbarrows and other wheeled gardening devices.

3. Install edging, short walls or other barriers along the perimeter of paths. This allows a definite border between paths and gardens to prevent accidental damage to plants. To install these borders you may need to dig additional trenches on the outer edges of the paths or place edging materials on the soil surface.

4. Surface paths through your garden space using any preferred methods. You may choose to pour concrete, for guaranteed weed proofing. For a more permeable surface -- allowing rain and other water to penetrate the soil beneath -- pave paths with brick or stone on a gravel and sand base, or lay down 3 to 4 inches of pea gravel, wood chips or other cover. You can also grow grass or other ground cover, or leave your paths as bare dirt.

5. Prepare the soil inside fixed beds each year for the upcoming growing season. To prepare the soil, till in compost or aged manure to add nutrients and aerate the soil. This is necessary in fixed gardens, as soils compact and lose nutrients each time a garden is grown in the beds.

Tips & Warnings

• When excavating for paths, line path beds with landscape fabric to prevent weeds from growing up and through the paving materials. You'll still need to be vigilant, though, because weed seeds can take root and sprout in gravel, wood chips or other loose pathway covering.

• Add a trail of paving stones to dirt or grass pathways, for a "partially paved" approach.

• Leave strips measuring at least 2 feet wide between parallel paths in a garden design, to allow for small garden strips or plots.

References

• West Virginia University Extension Service: Gardening With Raised Beds
• Cornell University Extension: Raised Bed Gardening
• Mother Earth News: Build Permanent Beds & Paths

Resources

• University of California, Davis Cooperative Extension: Walking Down a Garden Path