How We Made Mud-Free Garden Paths That Last!

Hello dear friends, I'm glad to welcome you to our channel. In this video I want to show you the concept of a clean vegetable garden, meaning a garden without any mud. This is especially relevant if you have clay soil in your garden, or if heavy soil sticks to your shoes after rain, when it's wet, and so on. And besides, weeds often grow up between the rows between our beds, whether they're regular beds or not. And then you either have to weed them, or take some other measures to get rid of those weeds, so that they don't, so to speak, invade the cultivated plants. So here are the paths we've marked out to move between the beds. They are now, the soil here a little bit, it was dug up, but now it is a little bit curved. Therefore, the first thing we do is level it along the entire path and loosen it a little. Now my dear friends, we truly need a very light and delicate rake for this particular task. With their help we will remove stones, if any, some stupid, unnecessary ones. Now we will meticulously cover our soil, which frequently sticks to the soles of work shoes, with a very thin and uniform layer of drainage material. In our specific case, the chosen drainage material will be ordinary, readily available river sand, which we will now carefully and evenly spread across the surface in a consistent layer. So we've laid down the sand. And now we need to gently go over it again with the rake. This is a light drainage layer. Since we don't have a special roller, we'll use this old cast iron sewer pipe instead. It's quite heavy, but we'll still press it down a little as we go. And we roll it like this. This is to even out the surface a bit. Of course, the surface won't be perfectly smooth. But first of all, the sand will get a bit more compacted. And secondly, it will still become more even. And basically, our path is almost ready. Now we're going to cover this structure that we've worked on and spent so much time on. We're going to use agro-textile. Please don't confuse agro-textile with agro-nonwoven fabric. Agro-nonwoven is a great material, but for intensive use, for walking on it every day. And we will be walking on it every day with buckets, with wheelbarrows, and so on. It just won't work. Agro-textile is perfect for this, absolutely ideal. I suggest you take a closer look at agro-textile, what it is, in case someone doesn't know. I say this because I know many people aren't familiar with it. To be honest, I myself first saw agro-textile three years ago in the Netherlands when we were there as farmers. It's actually been used for a very long time, specifically for this purpose. For these purposes, they cover the surfaces on their farms with it, and then place various materials or their seedlings on top. Take a look at what this is. This is what agro-textile is. It makes a bit of a sound like this. It is breathable, allows moisture to pass through, and is UV-stabilized. That's why, for our purposes, for mulching pathways, it is absolutely ideal. Trim it, cut it with a little extra margin, so you can fold it under later as well. Agro-textile tends to fray, so it's best to cut it either with a soldering iron or a hot-cutter. I've seen this on YouTube. Some people use hot objects to cut it. That way, the edges get sealed, and it doesn't unravel. But in our case, that's not necessary, because we're going to fold it under now, so it won't be able to unravel at all. You need to fold the edge under, just as I described. It's best to do this with two people. Stretch it out and measure it roughly like this. Then we will carefully adjust it a little bit, so that there is as little empty space as possible left between the outer borders and our decorative edging material. That's it. It's secured. And we continue like this, moving on. Next nail. The more force we use when driving it into the ground, the more likely it is to hold the agro-textile securely. After securing one side, we fasten the next side in the same way, trying to keep the surface as evenly stretched as possible. And by the way, I may not have mentioned in this video what density is being used. We are using a density of 80 grams per square meter. With this density, no weeds will be able to penetrate. All the best to you. May your gardens be clean and bountiful. Goodbye.