New path

The path in Mandala 1 has always been a problem. When I first set up the permaculture garden, I followed Linda Woodrow's book to the letter, so I dug out a path and filled it with sawdust. Only months later a windstorm arrived that destroyed both the original chook dome and the path. Most of the sawdust was picked up by the wind and distributed either over the garden beds or into the pond in the middle circle. Bruce then had the bright idea of constructing a bark path, using the bark from the pine logs we cut for firewood. This turned out to be highly labour intensive, and the first job for our WOOFERs was to weed the bark path. Meanwhile, in Mandala 2, we simply left the grass to grow in the paths, and that's been much easier to maintain - we just mow it regularly. 

Last month Bruce finally admitted defeat and decided to swap the bark path in Mandala 1 for a grass one. Our French WWOOFER, Aud, did a great job of clearing the path of bark and weeds, then sowing it with grass seed. Now we have the first green shoots appearing. Here are some photos of the newly cleared path, with our fantastic crop of sunflowers (all self sown) in the background.

  Click on photos to enlarge images

Comments

[Greenie]

Wow! What great looking sunflowers. When we grow sunflowers (self-sown from the chook feed) the white cockatoos get them before I can harvest them for the chooks! Always wanted a dog like that. Am just starting a blog about building my own food forest in Canberra. Link to it here
canberragreenie.blogspot.com

[David]

Hi there, congrats on your work in the permaculture garden, we used sugar cane mulch on our pathways, it was quite long lasting but still needed topping up all the time.
regards David.

[Julie.]

And a lovely crop of dog in the middle ground.

Hope you are well,

Julie.