Herb Spiral Update

We got excited and took a trip to the nursery to buy a few herbs to enhance our herb spiral. These included mint, dill (an unusual variety that grows into a shrub), phak phai (an ingredient for the Thai dish laab), various kinds of basil, and even though they’re not herbs we snuck some strawberries in there too..

Here’s the strawberries being planted. We planted them between larger herbs to shade the strawberries (in temperate climates strawberries like full sun, but for the subtropics half sun is ideal).

The herb spiral really is a pleasure to look at and taste too of course. Anyone with an itty bitty space can make one. They are easy and cheap to make and so so rewarding afterwards!  

For a step by step process on how to make an herb spiral keep reading!

Herb Spiral

Classic Permaculture design. We didn’t really feel like a Permaculture place without one of these.

Herb spirals are quite a simple idea really. You create a three dimensional spiral using earth and rocks. You plant your sun, dry-loving herb species at the top of the spiral, and your shade, moist-loving species at the bottom.

Herb spirals need to be double reach for easy picking (that means you can reach the middle from either side). So they shouldn’t be wider than 5ft across and 3ft high.

How to make one of these awesome spiral whirls? Here’s some easy step-by-step ways to do it!

To start with, you clear and level where you want your spiral.

Then you pile up a layer of mulch.

Next you prepare the soil of your herb spiral by mixing sand and cow poop together.

Then you pile all that soil on top of the mulch. Keep adding soil until you reach the desired height of your spiral.

Next put on your stones in a spiral form. Try to be intuitive about where the stones should go. Put your big rocks at the bottom to hold the soil. Keep that Golden ratio in mind. Make it pretty!

Next, to make our spiral extra fertile, we added worm castings on the top.

Next we mulched our herb spiral with rice husks.

Then you plant your seeds!

Get everyone in on the planting!

Enjoy!