What is a garden without a path?

Every garden needs a path, but ours does expecially. The earth in our garden is basically clay. Useful stuff to make cups and plates from, but less useful if you want to walk across it repeatedly. We know from bitter expereince that if you have to walk up and down the garden a lot and it decides to rain, the "path" rapidly becomes a horrible, sticky quagmire.

The obvious thing is to put in a path. But paths cost money :-(

Fortunately we had a bit of luck and found an eBay auction with 300 bricks that was about 10 minutes away. I say we, but in reality it was Andie. She's very good at finding baragins on eBay :-). Even better we won the bricks for only £21.55.

One of the many advantages of owning horses is having a horse lorry. Horse lorries are great, you can transport horses in them, you can go shopping in them (yes, we do) and you can go and collect 300 brick with ease :-)

Once we got them home and unloaded we stacked them up in the garden.

Assisted by a collie, of course.

With all the bricks in the garden, the obvious thing to do was lay them out to see if we had enough. Also it gave us the chance to play around with patterns. Why? Well, the bricks we'd bought were in two sizes, a square and a slightly smaller rectangle.

Of course in all activites of this type, having the right equipemnt. If you look at the picture below you'll see the tea cup and biscuit tin in the picture. We take our work here seriously!

A bit of measuring and some trial and error suggested that 4 bricks wide would let us lay a path the length of the garden.

By incredible good luck we seem to have, literally, just enough bricks to make the path. It's almost unbelievable.

Looking Good! I reckon we're onto a winner here. Of course we'll need to dig out the path and put down hardcore so the path will last (and last, and last).

You may have noticed Enya our collie in various of these pictures. Collies think gardening is wonderful and a great opportunity to play with their people. To that end Enya brought out 14 toys into the garden today :-)

Collies Rule!