The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Mud-free path

Path made out of barkMud, mud, mud.  I know it's made an appearance in nearly every entry I've made for the last month.  That's because mud has been such a big presence in our life ever since the ground started to freeze and the rain turned the upper layer into a wet, goopy mess.  Try as I might (granted, not all that hard), I can't keep the trailer floor from acquiring a thick layer of dirt every few days as we track in boots covered with mud.

But for the last few days, the dirt on our floors has been a little less extreme.  We've been collecting the bark which falls away from the walnut logs as we split them for firewood and laying it out in a path outside our door.  I love it when we can solve a problem for free using discarded materials!



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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One neat idea is to pick up some old roofing shingles where someone is replacing their roof, and lay them out for a walk. A friend did this and the walk is still holding up after 10 years. Put the black side up for looks.
Comment by Errol Sat Jan 10 09:20:14 2009
I like the shingle idea too. We had tossed around the idea of making a brick path like yours, but so far we're very pleased with our bark path. :-)
Comment by anna Sun Jan 11 19:53:17 2009





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