Progress - Albeit slow!

Given the recent run of above normal temps in our area for the past week, I decided to dive in and begin my garden reconfiguration. It's not often the we have 60 degrees to approaching 70 anytime in January. My garden area is 19 ft. wide and about 34 ft. long including the 48 square ft. footprint of my greenhouse. The current garden was compose of 2-4ft wide paths that ran 21 ft. long before the greenhouse was erected. That means I had 168 sq. ft. plus an additional 48 sq. ft. area in a small area next to my garage. That gave me 216 sq. ft. of planting area. Here are some pictures of what it looked like before reconfiguration.

These pictures show the entrance walkway, the walkway at the bottom of the garden, the first bed, the second walkway with the second bed to it's left, the walkway at the top of the garden that leads to the greenhouse and finally, the 6X8 bed to that is to the right of the entrance walkway. The garden looks pretty unorganized and cluttered. Around October I decided that I needed to get rid of the pavers and cement bricks that I had accumulated over the years. So, I had begun to do that but then decided to stop everything until I had an actual plan in mind.
I have decided to repurpose the pavers to build a pathway in the main entrance all the way to the neighbors fence. If I have enough, I will then use them in the various walkways to cut down on mud and the need to cut grass. If I don't have enough pavers, my next option would be wood chips or some kind of mulch as I really don't want to cut grass. 
o, after analysis and investigation, I have discovered that most gardening "experts" advocate for 3ft. wide beds instead of 4. According to their studies, it allows more of the area you have to be put into production. It also makes for easier maintenance of the plants and allows you to better space the plants which increases the production. After putting this to the test, it turns out that I will have approximately 309 sq. ft. of planting space without expanding the area required and not including the 48 sq. ft. of the greenhouse. I lose about 200 sq. ft with the main entrance path and the 4 paths along the garden beds. I could reduce the main entrance width but I really want that path to carry the width of the 2 fence posts back to the neighbors fence for symmetry. I will now have 5 planting rows along with 2 in the area next to my garage. So, where I had 2, I now have will have 7. I must say I was a little shocked at this. 
On my first attempt to remove the pavers Saturday, I decided to tackle the hardest ones. Those would be the ones shown in the picture to the left below. The other two show where I stopped and the pile I created. They consisted of the pile against the shed and fence and the ones buried in the ground. Not an easy task by any means. It was a rather surprisingly back breaking job. I was able to get about 90 pavers moved so that wasn't a bad days work.

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In order to extract the pavers, I relied on 3 very old friends as seen in the picture. Some people would call them antiques though. They are a 5 tine pan head hoe, a 4 tine wooden handled spade and an old fashion ice scraper The dog in the back round is my neighbors very nosey but friendly dog. He just can't help himself.

I will have more work to report on in my next post in the very near future. So much is going on but I am determined to keep this up to date. Until next time, Happy Gardening everyone!