How do you keep a garden from becoming a sea of mud in the winter?

[fivemack]

The path from the back gate of the garden to the back door of my house is a single line of trampled grass and mud. Mostly mud, this time of year.

Having dug a very large hole in one of the beds and half-way across the path to remove a tree-stump obviously doesn't help, the packed earth is converted into loose earth which turns rapidly into the finest grade of mud.

Is there any good way of keeping this from happening? It's a rented house so I'm not willing to spend very much on things like gravel; are there decent matting materials that I could get at reasonable price and just unroll across the garden, or would that be expensive, ugly and ineffective? The grass is already pretty ruined so I wouldn't mind too much about matting killing the grass under it, but I'd want matting that would survive a couple of years unloved outdoors.

With about half a cubic yard of builder's sand, a couple of square metres of paving stones and a quantity of plastic liner, which looks like about a hundred pounds in cost, plus a large amount of healthy shovelling and rolling, I could actually build a proper path of paving stones laid on sand; maybe this is something to discuss with the landlord.

Comments

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

The outdoor carparks where I work are surfaced with something looking like the top one of these over grass and seem to work; the grass grows through the holes.
Starting with something that's not a morass and that is basically reasonably-drained would seem to be a prerequisite. An advantage would be that they can be shifted away relatively easily if your landlord gets snotty about them.

[aldabra]

Yes. Something like this: http://www.arch.si/plasticne_resetke_ang.htm

Either B&Q or Homebase sells this stuff by the yard, go out into their outdoor garden section and turn left and it's over there. But I can't remember which and both their webpages have defeated me.