All paths lead to... the greenhouse

As the sun is so rare at the moment, I spent as much of the day out in the veg garden as possible to make the most of it - I thought this weekend was supposed to be cold and wet so the warm sun all day has been an unexpected bonus (however wallpaper stripping has taken a serious nosedive).

As there are still so many slabs around the garden I decided to use them to make some more paths between beds - really useful when the soil has been so wet and sticky.  I found another 5 slabs winding their way down the garden behind the old pond - and a frog too when I was digging them up.  I put them down to finish the main path  running from the entrance to the veg garden up to the greenhouse and then started on another path between beds 1 and 2.

Plan of the kitchen garden (not everything is in place yet but this is where it is planned for now)

I laid all of the path between beds 1 and 2 with broken slabs thinking there were no more intact ones -  and did it properly with sand and mixed hardcore that had been left lying around in the garden so its fairly level and stable compared to some of the other paths put down so far.  While clearing soil off a carpet under where bed 5 is due to go I discovered yet another buried path. This was after yesterday's discovery of a path under bed 3 which was jarringly painful when I enthusiastically plunged the fork into it and it stopped dead. Anyway, this most recent path is made up of two very large slabs running perpendicular to the greenhouse and on top of them some more running parallel to the greenhouse. We've already moved about 6 slabs from this area to make the path on the north side of bed 3. Its all a bit like an archaeological dig; digging down through the layers to find older and older paths underneath - I think that this might have been the bottom-most path though.

The new path between beds 1 and 2

While there is an ever increasing pile of rubbish forming in one place in the garden - all along where bed 4 will be eventually (and I stand here to take all the photos so no-one can see it!) - the garden is now starting to look a lot clearer in other places and I've managed to clear a lot of the dumped rubbish from bed 1. Underneath the apple tree in bed 1 is another of the strange mounds of soil that are abundant in the garden. I'm not sure where in the garden it has come from, or why, but as it is all on top of an old cream carpet, it has clearly been put there on purpose. Having found no body under it as I excavated I've started to redistribute it elsewhere - bed 1 is starting to look more level, and the remainder of the soil will eventually move to the bed 5 area. Because of the carpet this soil was on, the bottom of the mound is very clay-ey and filled with some of the biggest worms I've ever seen - the soil at the top of the mound however is lovely and crumbly.

There are a number of plants around the garden (and in the soil mounds) that I am fairly certain are Aquilegia -  I'm really happy about this as I love these flowers and had loads self-seeding in the old garden, but  when we moved I wasn't able to find and dig them out and bring them like I did with the comfrey, meadow cranesbill, oregano, mint, lemon balm, thyme and Monkey puzzle tree.  I've moved these aquilegia plants to bed 1 as some are clearly very happy growing under the apple tree already - apparently they like dappled shade as well as full sun.

Finally, I sprinkled a load of sweet rocket and poppy seeds (collected from the old garden) along the cracked path - this will probably drive me mad in the summer if they germinate well, but it all looks so sterile at the moment and I want to start this garden being as bee-friendly as possible straight away.