How to Build an Herb Spiral

After Bea decided to turn the ugly dead-tree laundry pole into a focal point (a bottle tree!) for our new garden, she also wanted to put in an herb spiral at its base.  Neither of us had built one of these before, so after a lot of googling, we settled on the following procedure.  All told, it took about 8 hours to build, albeit that was with only one person working, and with some breaks factored in as part of that time estimate.  It's probably a half-day project with a couple of people just gettin'-it-done.

Step 1: Find some old bricks or stones (or new ones if you prefer)

Bea found a huge pile of weathered old bricks under the overhang on the back of the outbuilding we call the chicken coop (no, we don't have chickens...yet).  She had been trying to come up with a project to use them up so we could walk through without clambering over the brick pile; this find helped inspire the herb spiral idea in the first place.

Step 2: Set up your circle

Once you have a good supply of bricks, install a stake temporarily into the spot you want to be the center of your herb spiral.  In our case, we didn't need a stake, we just worked from the dead tree/bottle tree.  Get a string or tape measure and use it to mark out a perfect circle.  Remove any weeds/vegetation growing in this area (Bea dug it up lightly to loosen the soil).  If you were doing this in the fall, you could put down cardboard or layers of wet newspaper to avoid the weed removal, but in spring when they're growing rapidly, it's best to just put in the effort to remove them.  Our circle has a 3' radius.

Step 3: Lay out your spiral

Use your bricks/stones to mark out a spiral.  Keep in mind that depending on what you plan to plant, a lot of herbs like to spread out so they'll need plenty of space.  We only built a two-layer spiral with each layer being 18" wide.

Step 4: 

Fill in your spiral with a layer of compost.  You can put compost in between the bricks too to help hold everything together.

Step 5: Cover with straw

Make sure you get straw, not hay -- hay is for animals to eat and thus contains nutritious seed-heads (which will sprout in your garden).  Straw is just dry stalks without seeds, and much more suitable for use in mulching a garden!

The straw will break down slowly and continue providing nutrients to your growing plants over time.

Step 6: Build up a second layer of bricks

Place a second layer of bricks over top of the first around the spiral.  You'll want your spiral to end up sort of like a pyramid/cone, with the center being tallest -- so taper off on stacking the bricks as you get towards the bottom.  Don't forget to stagger your bricks as you stack them, like in a brick wall!  So each brick you place on the spiral should overlap two bricks below.  If you're working with brick pieces instead of whole bricks, just do your best to overlap joints so they don't fall over and collapse.

Step 7: Fill in with compost, repeat as many times as needed

You'll repeat the brick/compost/straw layers until you either run out of materials or until your spiral reaches its desired height.  Ours is 4 layers of bricks at the top and 1 at the bottom, or about a foot and a half tall in the center.

Step 8: Get ready to plant!

Part of the beauty of an herb spiral is that it gives you multiple “planting zones" suitable to growing a variety of herb plants.  The soil at the top of the spiral will dry out quickest, while the bottom of the spiral will remain moister.  In the northern hemisphere, your southern part of the spiral will get direct sun most of the day while the raised nature of the spiral will provide some shade for the northern side.  The taller and larger your spiral is, the more customized you can make each position for your plants (just don't forget you'll need to be able to reach into the middle to harvest!).

So now you've got some choices to make -- note that some herbs do well in multiple positions:

Sunny Dry Positions (at/near the top of your herb spiral) – aloe vera; bay tree; garlic chives; lavender; marjoram; oregano; rosemary; sage; tarragon; thyme

Shady Dry Positions (on the northern side, in the shadow of your spiral and/or taller plants) – basil; nasturtium; oregano; parsley; sage; tarragon; thyme; yarrow

Sunny Moist Positions (middle/southern side of herb spiral) – arugula; bergamot; chives; cilantro/coriander; nasturtium; parsley; sorrel; spring onions; strawberries

Shady Moist Positions (middle/northern side of herb spiral) – arugula; borage; chamomile; chives; parsley; sorrel; strawberries; violets

Sunny Wet Positions (bottom of herb spiral on the southern side) – chamomile; mints

Shady Wet Positions (bottom of herb spiral on the northern side) – ginger (harvest before frost); lemon balm; mints; watercress (often installed in a shallow pool at the very bottom of herb spirals)

Chris came out to help right in time for the fun part!

You'll have best success if you plant transplants (as opposed to direct seeding) in your herb spiral, so start by placing all your plants in pots around the spiral.  This way you can move them around to space them evenly and move as many times as you need until they're exactly where you want them.  Once you're ready, just go ahead and pop them into the ground.

Since the spiral is constructed of straw and compost (both of which drain very easily), you'll need to water deeply and daily until your new plants are well-established!

East side

South side

West side

North side

Our completed bottle tree/herb spiral garden centerpiece!

Building our Bottle Tree

Remember a few months ago when I was lamenting how many obstacles our new garden site had?  Back when I was doing wintertime planning of the garden, I was looking for some inspiration for how to deal with our laundry line/dead tree erected in the middle of the space which would become our garden, so I entered a Google image search for “dead tree garden art".  After searching through hundreds of images (or maybe it was only 10 but seemed like more due to our veeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrryyyyy slooooooooooooooowwww internet connection!), I came across this page on building a bottle tree, and I knew that was what I wanted to make from our dead tree.  The runner up was this awesome bicycle-bespectacled tree stump, but our tree was tall & narrow so I'll have to wait for another stump before building one of those!

Beautiful cobalt blue bottle!

When Chris came in from one of his epic battles against invasive vines, I greeted him with “Baby, we've got to go buy some Bud Platinum so we can build a beautiful blue bottle tree!"  Chris gave me that blank stare like he hadn't thawed out yet, had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, and/or couldn't hear me through his earmuffs.  I excitedly showed him some of the images I'd found, but he still seemed a bit glazed over.  “But neither of us likes beer," he eventually pointed out.  “We promised we'd throw a housewarming party!" I countered.  And so our plan was born!

Once we knew what to look for, googling images matching “bottle tree" yielded a wealth of inspiration.  We found this bottle trees website which certainly meets its claim to impart “more than you ever wanted to know about bottle trees," in enormous comic sans font no less!  We discussed what each of us liked and didn't like about each of the photos, and then forgot about it until a couple of months later, when it was suddenly time for our party.

To accommodate large amounts of beer & potluck foods at the same time as our many, many pounds of spring greens, we plugged in a 2nd fridge on the side porch and started swapping out all our food with beer so that the regular kitchen fridge would end up holding snacks and drinks that guests could easily access during the party.  Somehow this seemed like a good idea at the time; the problem was that we only gave ourselves negative 2 hours to finish the project.  After a half-dozen guests showed up at 4pm on the dot (which to be fair was technically when we said the party would start, but by that we really meant 5pm!) -- we quickly shifted into the role of host/ess and abandoned the fridge-switching project midstream, leading to a lot of confusion.  Many, many hours and bottles of wine later, Chris remembered the precious blue beer bottles were still buried in the porch fridge!  He brought them out and tried to pawn them off on our few remaining late-night guests, but alas by then there weren't too many takers.  Thank you to the friends & family who did help us consume this disgusting beverage in the name of garden art!

The week after our party, it was finally time to build the bottle tree.  We brought a laptop out to the garden and opened up my personal favorite, MS Paint.  I took a photo of our bottle-tree-to-be, then drew in its “branches" so we could figure out some proportions that looked good to us:













Chris really wanted to use sticks so that the branches would be naturally curved, and he set up a small prototype.  It was indeed beautiful but they unfortunately weren't very sturdy.  Plus, they weren't perfectly round, meaning we'd have to figure out gluing small wedges into the holes to stabilize them somehow.  And we'd have to switch drill bits every 10 seconds.  We decided to use more uniform materials for this, but as the mood strikes him, Chris will build a series of “bottle bushes" around the property.

I had taken a lap through the old general store and our “skinny tall things in a bucket" collection, and rounded up everything I could find in the approximately 1/4"-3/4" diameter range.  This included dowel rods, metal curtain rod pieces, electrical conduit elbows, wooden sticks from oversized lollipops, and who knows what else.  We settled on the curtain rods and 1/2" dowels, for consistency's sake.

We decided we wanted a tri-color tree (blue, green, and brown), with about equal representation from each color.  But we both agreed the blue was the most beautiful.  We had to open some more of the Bud Platinum while we worked on this project in order to have enough bottles!  A couple bottles may have “accidentally" tipped over in the grass.

We started with a bright blue Skyy vodka bottle at the very top.  We only own one of these bottles--that stuff is too expensive!  (Side note: the delicious Skyy ginger vodka did help inspire our foray into infusions!  We're pleased that our homemade version tastes even better :-)

Then Chris worked on holding dowels with bottles on them while I sat on the swing and said “A little to the left" and Chris said “Whose left?  Do you mean South-by-southeast?" and I said “Ummmm....  Errr......  Well, the sun is over there.... but I don't know what time it is...  So I guess that doesn't help."  We both got fairly frustrated with each other, but just at that moment, Chris's dad texted us that he was going to fly his plane over our house -- the perfect distraction!  Sometimes you just need to take a break.








Slowly, it all came together, one dowel at a time.  We thought we might have to add in some wood glue, but it turned out that the dowels/rods wedged into the holes tightly enough on their own.  I got to be the “artistic director" saying which color bottle should go where, and which angle it should point at, and Chris was the driller whose execution sometimes improved on my best judgment.  Teamwork, makin' the dream work!

The next day, I took lots of photos so I'd remember where everything was and took bottles inside to soak the labels off.  Really, I should've done this before we started building, but I didn't.  Like I said, we were still trying to drink up the beer during this whole process!

We tried to make our tree look good from any angle, although the primo viewing spot is definitely the porch swing installed at the south end of the garden.

  

It came out fairly close to our original sketch!

Bottle trees look best when they catch the sunlight; they're also called “a poor man's stained glass!"

Growing Glorious Gutter Gardens!

Chris with part of our 2013 strawberry harvest

Chris seriously LOVES strawberries!  We've mentioned a couple of times how in 2013, poor Chris practically broke his back by spending 6+ hours stooped over his precious strawberry patch, trying to eradicate all the evil ground ivy.

We recently came across a photo of how bad our old strawberry patch was a couple of weeks before Chris meticulously weeded it in the infamous back-breaking weeding session:

There are strawberries in there?!?

Well, so while we moved quite a lot of herbs, asparagus, and other plants to our farmhouse in 5-gallon buckets, we didn't transplant any of our strawberries just in case the entangled ground ivy hitched a ride and started invading our new yard.

So this meant that Chris has to go without homegrown strawberries this season!  To give him something to look forward to, we did buy 75 strawberry plants to get started so we can have a larger-than-ever harvest next year!  We decided to plant the strawberries in 3 different areas and see how they fare.

Regular In-Ground Planting

This is pretty self-explanatory.  Bea promises to weed the strawberries so Chris doesn't have to!  There are two varieties growing in this bed, a total of 40 plants.  This photo is taken from the porch swing we put in our main garden area, so the strawberries will be easy for us to keep an eye on every time we sit down to take a break!

Topsy Turvy Strawberry Planter

This was a present Bea gave Chris for his birthday last year after he'd mostly recovered from the back injury he acquired in his quest to save his delicious strawberries.  It's kind of a gimmick, it even says “AS SEEN ON TV" on the side of the box!  But the lure of weed-free strawberries leads us all to try some crazy things.  The planter is basically a tube of plastic that expands to hold sterile potting mix (sterile = no weeds!).  You plant the strawberries out the portals on the sides, so they grow sideways.  This planter holds 15 plants, so we have two varieties of strawberries growing in here to see how they do.  We'll update as they grow!

Gutter Gardens

The internet indicates that it's gotten pretty popular to plant strawberries in gutters!  We've never tried it before, but it seemed like a great idea to keep weeds out of the berry patch, so we're giving it a try.  We installed these in our hoophouse, where ideally weed seeds won't be blown in.  Here's how we did it:

Step 1: Acquire gutters & endcaps

Safety first!

We found some assorted & mismatched gutters for super-cheap at Community Forklift, our favorite reuse store.  I think we paid $10 for the lot of them.  The 14' sections only just barely fit in adVANture Van, with a piece of cardboard to stop the sharp metal from scratching the windshield!  We somehow got home without incident.

Definitely the modern system

We decided to use the two lengths of round gutters for this project, while we'll use the regular gutters on the sides of the hoophouse for the rain collection system.  Unfortunately though, we couldn't find round endcaps anywhere locally.  So we ordered 4 of those from guttersupply.com, and they arrived almost instantly, really fast shipping!  Chris used Bea's grandpa's antique rivet gun to attach the endcaps.  You might want to caulk the seam from the inside with waterproof caulk intended for use with gutters -- we forgot about this step but it seems to work fine, just water more often if you don't caulk it.

Step 2: Tie your knots

We debated for a really long time about the best type of knot and pulley system to use.  Ultimately, we opted to keep it super simple -- we just looped a double length of rope around the gutter, connected to itself with an overhand knot, and tossed it over the purlin of the hoophouse, no pulleys needed!  We temporarily tied a loose knot around the hip board until we could go to the hardware store to buy some cleats.

There are some really fancy ways you can connect gutters (we especially liked this one), but in our case we are going for functionality and affordability over aesthetics, and this system meets both our goals.

Step 3: Attach cleats

This is somewhat optional, but it will make it a lot easier than tying & untying knots every time you want to raise & lower your gutter garden.  Also, we wanted to keep the weight of the gutter garden off our hipboards since those will eventually be supporting the weight of water running through exterior gutters and we're a little dubious about how sturdy they are!  Since we're attaching these cleats to the metal hoops we used self-tapping metal screws.

So now your garden should look like this:

Now you're ready to plant!

Step 4: Add a layer of pea gravel

Along with many other ridiculous things we decided to move from the city, we ended up with a tub of leftover pea gravel that we knew would come in useful for something, someday.  Up north, it had been stored outdoors for a few years in a plastic container which had cracked, so as we moved it onto our dolly the thing slowly started splitting open.  To get it into the van, we had to use a couple of ratchet straps to hold everything together and prevent further breakage.  Needless to say, this was one of those times Chris says “Are you SURE we need this $#@%$#% gravel?" and Bea says “It's for your STRAWBERRIES!" and Chris says “ANYTHING for my strawberries!" and we get it loaded no matter how much of a pain in the butt it is!  Once we got it to the farmhouse, we procrastinated unloading the van for a full month, trying to forget it existed.  There were also 1,000 pounds (yes, literally) of cinder blocks that we'd moved at the same time, so that might've had something to do with it too.  adVANture Van was a hard worker!  Eventually, we shoveled the gravel into a spare trash can where it sat forgotten until we were installing this gutter garden.  But then, it was the perfect thing!

So anyway, add a layer of gravel in the bottom of your gutters.  This will improve the drainage and make sure the roots of your plants aren't sitting in pools of water.  You don't need a ton, just an inch or so.

Step 5: Add potting mix

We used a lightweight sterile potting mix and will fertilize (organically) rather than adding compost, which may contain weed seeds.  You could also use any homemade mixture of soil/compost/perlite/sand/etc but just keep in mind the weight of your system will probably double when watered, so try to aim for a lightweight mix.

Step 6: Plant!

We counted out our remaining plants (20) and measured the gutters (12' each) and did the math to space them evenly.  Strawberries should be planted 12-18" apart, so as long as you're within that range you should be OK.

Step 7: Water regularly!

Here Chris demonstrates you can either lower the gutters to waist-height to water them,
or just stand on a 5-gallon bucket.

Being able to lower the gutter gardens will definitely come in handy when it's time to harvest next year!

Grow, strawberries, grow!!!