Complete!

Well, I finally finished digging out and mulching the paths between the garden beds today. It looks lovely and afterwards I spent a good half hour lying in the hammock under the trees in the shade gazing at it with a nice cup of tea. It's looking full and lush and I'm amazed at the work gone into it (without it feeling like a chore), the lack of knowledge I had when I embarked on the project and yet it's been really successful so far. I've learnt a lot that I will try and improve on for next year (with more lessons to be learned along the way I'm sure!). I'm not sure how the weed control method will hold up (ie thick newspaper and mulch*), but hopefully it will give me a break from the constant weeds creeping in from the borders. Notice in the 2nd picture the apple tree branch lying (but still attached) on the ground...it looks like the apples are continuing to grow, so I'm pretty happy about that.

I've realised too that I don't need to rely on the garden beds to be harvested on a timeframe now that I've capped the number of beds I'll be planting out. I orginally was going to arrange it so the chicken tractor could be moved around as the beds were harvested (which I will still do), but now that I will stick with only 9 beds, it leaves me with plenty of spare space to have the chickens rotating on without running out of fresh greenery to put them on before the harvested beds are ready for them.

And, just coz, here is a picture of my first garden which I created in December last year - it all started from here...

* I wanted to make note of what my mulch comprised of: leaves from various trees (mixed with sand since that part of the property is fully sand with a bit of sparse grass growing on it), sawdust and partly composed grass clippings/leaves/twigs. It felt all very "permaculture-y" as I scrounged around my property finding appropriate materials to use as mulch. Today I was literally needing to move things to scrape underneath them to get together enough.