if you just use wood chips instead, you can inoculate them with mushroom spores. you’ll end up with some tasty treats and great compost. you can leave that compost where it is for the benefit of nearby plants, or you can toss it elsewhere in your garden and start again with new chips. fruit wood is pretty good for this sort of thing. it’s not terribly good for resisting decay. if you intend this to be a fairly temporary solution, I think your wooden flagstone plan is a good one. if you want it to last longer, there are some roughly non-toxic treatments available, but they’re expensive (seems being toxic is the easiest way to stop rot and toxic substances aren’t in terribly short supply these days), or require substantial time for curing and periodic re-treatment.

it’s not that pretty, but I’ve used chunks of busted up concrete from a patio somebody tore out. chances are good that a post on your local freecycle or craigslist would turn something like that up. new cement products (unless they’re made of fly ash) are very much less than “green”, though concrete would certainly be durable.

good luck. sounds like a fun project.

In some areas, you can contact your city or construction companies, and ask about broken-up sidewalks and similar concrete. Usually it’s free for the hauling, sometimes they’re so happy to not have to landfill it that they’ll deliver it (which is good, because it’s heavy).

You want to cherry-pick it, though… some of it looks really good upside-down, some of it looks really good rightside-up, and some of it just isn’t going to look like anything but construction trash no matter what. But if you get good stuff, you can lay it like flagstones and have it look really good.

I second everything Puu said. Spot-on observations.

Have you considered using roman chamomile or something likewise living that will tolerate foot traffic to create a path?

Or, if you know someone whose property contains a creek (like mine does) you could do what I did – flat creek rocks make a VERY nice path, and they’re free for the hauling.

That’s actually my plan for adding paths around beds as I finish delawning. We decided to go for stepping stones in a groundcover that could take some foot traffic in lieu of filling out the path with actual stones. If you’re worried about the slippage issue, you could use your wood to line the path and keep the grass from competing while the ground cover gets establish and by the time it breaks down your groundcover will be able to hold its own against the grass. Or at least it will be sufficiently establish that it will be it’s own fault if it loses to the grass…

Nax: Speaking from experience, one really efficient, if slow, way to get rid of the lawn is to get ducks. They don’t eat mature grass, but come spring, they’ll happily devour the tender sprouting bits as it comes out of dormancy (or tries to).

It remains to be seen whether that’ll actually kill the crabgrass we have, since as the clover and other things they like better come up they’ll be less interested in mere grass bits, but so far neither the fescue nor the crabgrass has successfully shown green for more than a day.

(And yes, that was a part of the plan. We’re overseeding with Dutch White Clover out back, anywhere there isn’t actual garden.)