Our Herb Spiral

Here is the finished herb spiral. I have placed a lavender on the top to attract bees and the spiral is planted with strawberries, parsley, coriander and sage. I am now planning on planting some thyme in the gaps of the actual wall as I have realised that would probably work and would expand the production space and provide more nectar for bees etc. I have spent about 14 hours making this at a total cost of $75 for the plants, compost and straw. I am really pleased with it and now just hope that it works! If you start from the bottom of the post you can see the steps that I took to end up here.

Then I added the straw and watered that in and then made pockets of compost and added the plants, watering it all in at the end. There were two lizards living in these pavers when they were a stack beside the fence so I am hoping that they will find their way to this, as well as other lizards.

 Then I added a layer of nasturtiums and comfrey leaves and under that is a layer of worm castings as I cleaned out the worm farm to use that too. Once again I watered the layer in the same way that each layer is watered in a no- dig garden.

 Some of the herb spiral demos I have watched on You Tube use all soil, and some use all straw, whilst others use a combination and layers. So I decided to add sand  first, then some wood, then cardboard and newspaper, watering between each layer.

 Because it is built on concrete I decided that I should have a layer of rubble in the bottom to assist drainage. I spent three hours smashing up broken pavers with a hammer to get a layer that I was happy with.

 Once I was getting down to the last few pavers I needed to make sure that there were going to be enough to make the centre higher and taper it down. It took a few readjustments but is almost finished here.

Once I had worked out my spiral, based on the size of the pavers and the shape that it needed to fit into, I started building it layer by layer. We have had a pile of pavers for a long time and as we do not want to put more pavers down this seemed like a good use of them. The concrete underneath is old and ugly so it will have to look better than that.

Picking Produce - Parsley

We have lots of Italian Parsley in the garden at the moment so I decided to try some new recipes.

Firstly I cooked up Parsley Soup, you can find the recipe and more information here.

I also made Lentil and Parsley Salad by modifying this recipe, using dried lentils which I boiled for 20 minutes.

Update 1st August 2010 Mulberries and the rest

Here is our lovely Mulberry tree covered in new buds on a lovely sunny day.

And the new garden now has seeds in it, Rockmelon, Beetroot, Lettuce, Tomatoes, Capsicums and Italian Parsley.

And the new garden in the back yard is now finished and today we planted a Lillypilly, a Brazilian Cherry and a Ginko Berry shrub, as well some Peas, Lettuce, Tomatoes and Capsicum

 

And  we moved the Lemongrass from beside the pool and added some Geraniums.

And to finish here is one of the newly blooming Everlasting Dasies, beautiful.

Update on Garden-May 2009

Here are the latest pictures, showing Andy assembling our first no dig garden out the front. It will take us a while to fill it with leaves, straw and newspaper, so we decided we should at least get started. The photos beside the pool show the area of pavers that i pulled up a couple of months ago. There was always grass growing there so we thought we may as well have something we could eat there. So separated out lots of chives and also have some surprise plants growing as a result of using worm castings. Finally, two shots of the no dig garden in the back garden, not the latest shot, but you get the idea of how amazing teh growth has been. In this garden we have tomatoes, eggplants, parsley, coriander, leeks, lettuce and potatoes regrowing