When I was younger (I hope you like that)my brother and I ran to the back of our house to escape the evil woman who lived two doors down. I have no idea why she was chasing us (she was just evil, I guess). As we ran along my dads veg patch we both skipped over his rake that was tines up, Mrs Evil was not so lucky and caught the handle of the rake she stepped on right between the eyes.

Trying to put what I learned regarding safety tips from that incident I imagine it's summed up thus: never leave a rake tine side up just in case your children entice (through no fault of their own) an enraged woman to black an eye with it leaving you no option but to give them a larraping and apologise to her.

Be careful with chain saws. I've never had anything happen, but plenty of others have had terrible accidents.

Wellspring, I'm sorry to hear you're out of commission for a time, may you heal well and quickly. Selfishly, I hope you can use your down time to post a bit more here. But I do not think it was so much the garden that was dangerous, but the stairs.

Ink, too bad you didn't have YouTube back then, that would have been a good one, I can just see it.

It's not my garden that is dangerous, it is my exposed feet being around all those loose and sharp implements of gardening. You know, if you drop your hand pruners blade-down on your foot, it makes a bloody mess, even if it's only a superficial flesh wound. Now that it's fall, I'm more likely to be working in my old distressed leather clogs, much safer than flip flops.

Oh my, I wish you a fast recovery! I won't even start with a list of potential dangers in the garden, since these are too numerous..

I can sympathize with you, Wellspring. I too managed to injure myself this season. I broke my foot. While it doesn't sound nearly as dramatic as a broken leg, it was a huge and very painful inconvenience and will probably never be completely back to normal (fractured 6 bones across the top of my arch and nearly 4 months later still can't fit into 'normal' shoes). And while the injury occurred inside the house, obviously it affected my ability to do much gardening. Even when I got off the crutches, I still had a lot of difficulty navigating my overplanted and cramped garden just to haul the hose around for watering. Forget mowing, weeding, etc. - it was all I could do, even with help, to keep things watered enough to stay alive!

Here's the big thing I learned from this: I am not getting any younger and this could be just the tip of the iceberg regarding future infirmities. My garden needs to be simplified and in a big way. And recycled concrete or even flagstone paths and walkways, despite how well laid they may be and softened by low creeping groundcovers, are not a good stable base for transport when you don't have two sound legs and feet to get you around. There's a lot to be said for formed and poured concrete in this situation.

PS. when you are a single person with a demanding job and a seasonally busy side job and drive a stickshift AND fracture your entire left foot, life gets very complicated very quickly :-)

Wellspring - I hope you recover quickly! I had a similar type accident in the early '90s - a tib-fib fracture after a fall on concrete steps at the front of our previous house. The cause in my case was an overgrown globe cedar narrowing the walkway, complicated by a severe snowstorm obscuring where the steps were and a steep slope on the opposite side to the cedars. The bones took more than 5 months to heal in my case - spring gardening in a cast is inconvenient!

gardengal - you are absolutely right that stone type walkways are decidedly inferior to poured concrete once you have mobility issues! I need a walker for mobility and once you are in a state where you need such things, believe me, you view things like stone and paver paths and patios in an entirely different way - especially in a climate with significant freeze-thaw cycles. As you say, no matter how carefully laid, it is inevitable that they will become uneven. Near the house I prefer poured concrete; in the garden where it wouldn't look appropriate, what works for me is paths made from pinebark mulch mixed with concrete sand - it packs down firmly and looks more natural. Because you don't expect it to be completely level, it's somehow easier to walk on than something you expect to be level but turns out not to be. And, if you do fall, pinebark/sand is a softer landing than stone or concrete :-)

Unless it cracks weeds and debris do not get into poured concrete like they do with paths made of rock or concrete fragments. And you can wash it. But you have to be willing and able to pay for poured concrete, and there is certainly too much of the Earth being covered by concrete as it is.

Wow, it's been a bad season for LDers! Here's wishing for an eventually complete recovery for you both.

My only accident so far has been tripping over my own clutter in the garden and skinning a knee, so clearing clutter is an obvious tip. But for an obsessive collector of everything including plants, that is easier said than done (given that, with the luxury of sight, I can delude myself into thinking I can navigate around it).

But I find my urge to collect has somewhat burned itself out and that as I get the whole property closer to "done" I can more easily pass on acquisitions that I can readily see that I have no space for. It has been at its worst while I still have as-yet-uncharted parts of the garden where a new object of plant lust "might" be able to go, or amorphous ideas that might require this container or that trellis or those rocks. As such, unnecessary acquisition is perhaps a peril of designing as I go.

That dovetails somewhere with Woody's bang-on observation about clear expectations.

KarinL

Ouch!! Hopefully you will find someone to edit your yard for your needs. I am reminded of the couple who appeared at the nursery one day with the request that I work with an architect designing a house for their daughter and son-in-law, both visually handicapped with a baby just beginning to crawl and two seeing eye dogs. Could I develop a landscape plan that was safe for the situation? I loved this project because it required so many interesting aspects of problem solving. And I learned how many generous people there are when called upon to help. Such as, there was a need for the two gates to be rigged so they would securely latch by themselves and have an alarm on them that would ring in the house when opened or failing to close. For this job I turned to a local carpenter and an electrician whom I knew often worked together on house construction. They enjoyed the project, did a terrific job and neither ever submitted a bill. The mason and I worked out a scheme of changing footpath textures so the young couple could orient themselves in the yard by the change of 'feel' underfoot. His bill was for materials only. Such kind people, both with their talents and good advice. Working through the necessary tactile needs was interesting. Plus the necessity for a yard which could be easily maintained by a landscape crew yet have the much desired fragrance and plant texture.

There must be someone in your area interested in helping you create a situation more suited to your gardening passion. Heal quickly and well. Please keep us updated on your progress.

Sorry to hear of your injury, Wellspring, I hope it heals quickly.

Even a seemingly minor incident can be dangerous. A couple of years ago I got what felt like a small splinter while working in the garden. I couldn't find any foreign object in my finger, and shrugged it off as just a small cut, and nothing to worry about. The problem was, it didn't heal. Over a period of many months, what should have been a tiny bit of scar tissue started "traveling", moving sideways under the skin, sometimes erupting through the surface, healing, and then recurring.

A trip to the doctor's office and some poking with a scalpel didn't reveal any foreign bodies. Neither did xrays. Almost a year and a half, and three surgeries later, the last with general anesthesia in the hospital, with still nothing solid found in the lesion, a culture finally found the problem: an infection with a resistant strain of staph.

I ended up with a peripherally inserted catheter (PIC line) that fed an IV line from my arm to my heart, and it had to stay in place for three weeks while I dosed myself with one-hour treatments, twice a day, of a strong antibiotic. I also had a reaction to the drug. To say that the experience was a major drag is an understatement.

So be careful out there. If you cut or scratch yourself, take a few minutes to wash the spot carefully with soap and water and apply an antibiotic and bandage. All sorts of wierd germs lurk in the environment, and you don't want to let them get into a break in the skin.

The kind words are appreciated. Tony, if laughter heals, then your rake story should be FDA approved. Ah, the innocence of youth.

Sorry to hear about your foot injury, GardenGal. I, too, am wondering how well the patched up body will eventually work. I sort of dread winter and snow and ice this year. About when the experts clear me to work with my dog again we'll be in the midst of January / February weather

I guess my confession should have included that I planted the plant that draped on the steps that created the debris that turned into the glass-slippery spot that sent Wellspring flying. So, plant placement as a safety factor?

Woodyoak- Your path work had already inspired me to start putting in "soft" mulch paths to places I go regularly in the garden. My hope is to eventually have a path that sort of circumnavigates my backyard. Right now I use my "mental map" to get around and can correct my direction when I get "lost" by finding certain key boundaries. One would be the concrete edge of the patio / sidewalk with the lawn, another is finding a fence and following it until I'm re-oriented. My hope would be to reduce the hit-and-miss wandering.

Nandina- That sounds like a fantastic project. My "mental mapping" is quite good, but the extra touches are what turn something from merely usable into a space that minimizes the stress of having to stay focused all of the time. You still need the focus, but the features you planned sound like they made that couple's home work more efficiently, as well as more safely.

Your story, Saypoint, was sort of my trouble from Aug to Dec 2007. I healed from an abrasion doing gardening chores, but several months later had a serious infection going on in that leg. My new rule is that I wear jeans all the time in the garden. I was lucky this year because it wasn't scorchingly hot, but I figure that I used to ride horses all summer in jeans so I can put up with the sweat. It did cut down both on mosquito bites and shin cuts this year and, although I broke my leg, the skin surface was absolutely undamaged

Sorry, folks, that these postings are sort of a downer. We've talked before about how gardens have served as humanity's bridge between the wild, untamed, dangerous wilderness "out there" and the so-called civilized places where we live. I think our stories point to the truth that we are always "in" nature. Natural laws are at work inside our homes and out, in our own backyards and backpacking in New Mexico. We can only minimize the potential for harm, and then continue to do what we love to do.

In other words, I think I'm missing my outdoor time. Spring will probably be extra sweet, and I think I'll work to a clearer purpose on my problem areas--the hose snakes come to mind, as well as really stupidly constructed (by me) raised beds.

Nothing like clarifying the problem as a first step to resolutions.

Wellspring

Wellspring - my path system works very well for me on a variety of levels, some of which may be appropriate for you as well. I'll try to give a description that might help you visualize it. The backyard garden and paths evolved over our 9 years here and are now in a pretty ideal state for my needs.

The backyard is roughly rectangular (one side is a few feet longer than the other but imagine a rectangle...) The house is on the east side; the back of the house forms an L, with a poured concrete patio filling the L to make it a rectangle and making a straight line across the back. So the backyard rectangle has the house and patio as its east boundary, and chainlink fences on the other three sides. There is an 8' wide alley along the north and south sides of the house. There is a 4" drop from the concrete patio to the lawn and that is ramped with paving stones - a wide (~7') ramp on the west side and a narrow 24" one on the north side. There is a 3' wide pinebark/sand mix path that runs from the driveway at the front of the house, through the south gate, down the south alley, across the rear of the lot, up the north alley to the north gate. There is also a path that runs across the back of the house connecting the north and south alley paths. The larger ramp from the patio enpties onto that path. The narrow ramp empties onto the north alley path. The paths run along the fences.

This spring we put in the final pinebark/sand path. We made the back lawn a rectangle. It is offset from the north fence by about 15' and offset from the south fence by about 20'. There is about 20' to the back fence. On the house side, it abuts the path along the back of the house. There is a 3' pinebark/sand path running between the lawn and the woodland garden beds that fill the space between the lawn path and the fence path. There are several cross paths that connect the inner and outer paths.

So try to visualize a smaller rectangle nested in a bigger one with links between them and the larger rectangle linked to the front yard through the alley paths.

The advantages of this arrangement for me are many and some seem pertinent to your situation.

- We have dogs (one of our own - we used to have two - and we dogsit frequently for friends). Dogs inevitably want to patrol/run the fencelines so it is easy to do it here without damaging the garden. The dogs also love to just run for fun and exercise, chasing each other around the paths and leaping across the beds to cross from inner to outer paths via the secondary linking paths. They really do take the path of least restance so prefer to run on the paths and have never caused any damage to the garden beds! I'm sure your dogs would have fun with the paths. Since the dogs follow the paths, the pattern of paths effectively increases the exercise space by giving them more tracks to run on.

- The outer paths are close to the fences so the fences are within reach for support if I need it (or orientaion references in your case.)

- The ramp material and the path material is different so, while I can see the difference, my vision is a bit fuzzy so the different textures helps confirm that I've moved from the path to the patio ramp or vice versa.

- Similarly, there is a difference in texture between the bark path and the lawn so you notice when you've strayed off the lawn path and onto the lawn or can tell when you've moved onto the lawn deliberately.

- The lawn is nice and easy to mow now as there are no curves (other than to smooth the corners of the rectangle). And the beds don't require edging any more because the lawn path separates the grass from the beds by 3'! Our lawn grass doesn't seem to like the path material so hasn't tried to grow across the path. The path material will probably need topping up every few years as the bark breaks down so adding new bark/sand will help smother any grass that tries to encroach. If need be, a bit of Round-up could be used to zap any encroaching grass. So the lawn path simplifies garden maintenance enormously!

- The combination of pinebork mulch and concrete sand packs down firmly. The dogs sometimes leave lauch grooves and skid marks when they get racing about. It's easy to rake it flat again with a garden rake. And as I noted above, falling on the bark-based path gives a softer landing than falling on hardscaping of any sort.

Sorry to be long-winded but I thought maybe there might be useful ideas for you in what I've done here.

Yee-ikes! Gardening as an extreme sport.

So sorry to hear about your broken leg wellspring and I have been sitting here grimacing and cringing over all the other garden injuries related too. Except for Mrs. Evil of course.

Body armour might come in handy I suppose but long sleeves, pants, a hat and titanium dioxide or zinc oxide based sunscreen of a high SPF are useful too. I was diagnosed with stage 2 melanoma on my leg two years ago (no more gardening in shorts) and am now missing a chunk of thigh 6" x 3" down to the muscle and a lymph node. No more miniskirts for me but I'm luckier than a gardening neighbor who lost her nose to melanoma.