dave said: I do have a lot of iron ore sandstones around here that would make an attractive spiral...

Sounds like a good winter project.


I wish I was younger and had more energy ... just the thought of attempting something like that makes me tired. I'd love to have two of those spiral's ... one for herbs and another for butterfly and hummingbird nectar plants. I can just picture hummingbirds and butterflies flitting all around!

Go for it, Dave. We'll be waiting for pictures!

Dave,
I was at Blue Moon yesterday and you told us about this herb spiral. I had to look. I think I would like to build one some day. Have you put a step-by-step tutorial anywhere?
It looks great. Good job.
Jo (Rusk County Master Gardeners)

Hi Jo, thanks for attending my talk, and for joining the site!

I have never made a full length tutorial on this, and I really should. I have all the photos, I just need to put them together in an article. I'll put it on my "need to do soon" list.

I would like to have such a tutorial handy, Dave.

II am doing some clean-up this spring and hope to use some of the wood to make raised beds. I don't have a shredder, but using the hugelculture method, Im thinking if I cut the wood into about 2 ft or shorter lengths to use as a base for the beds, it should work. Its green wood, so I hope it rots well.

This is an amazing coincidence but this very week I am working on the full tutorial of my herb spiral, along with lots of photos. The tutorial will be published by our friends at Gardener's Supply. I'll be linking to it when it's up!

hazelnut, your wood cut into small lengths will work perfectly. Being green it will indeed take longer to start breaking down but that's not a big deal if you don't mind waiting. What kind of wood is this?

Look forward to the tutorial ... I get e-mail updates almost daily from Gardener's Supply and will watch for it!

Lets see--the tree sized invasives I am cutting now are mimosa, sand pear, chinese privet, china berry, and several species of oak--including turkey oak. Oh and there is some kind of elm also.

Sounds like quite a salad, eh? And I also have some prunings from Magnolia and Pecan. There are some osage orange limbs that need to go in there as well--normally osage orange does not rot.

Yeah I would find something else to do with the osage orange...

That is probably true. I have one that has fallen over sometime back in the 1980s and it still hasn't started to rot yet.

Too bad that osage orange isn't big enough to cut lumber from. Sounds like good planter building material!

It is excellent for making garden structures out of. Little teepees for beans and things like that. It makes good fence posts, as well.

Oh, my osage oranges are big enough! They were planted as hedgerowes around the perimeter of an historic property in the 1840s. Osage oranges make good fence posts, but not really a good building material--as far as lumber goes. Perhaps you could devise a post structure, or perhaps a dug out vessel of some kind as a planter -- it would last for your great grand children.

The Indians made bows out of it. Here in Alabama, woodworkers sometimes use the orange wood as inlays along with magnolia (which is white). And some woodworkers make dough bowls, but even in that application there tend to be a lot of splits in the wood that have to be filled with epoxy.

Yes tepee like structures would be a good use for the pliable branches--especially those pesky ones that are growing out in the middle of my driveway!

We used to have an Alaska Sawmill (that's an attachment for a chainsaw, if you're not familiar with them) and used it to cut lumber from some of the large junipers that grew on our property in Oregon. Made some really pretty boards! But it was a very slow process....that stuff was HARD!

Hmm. I don't think Ive seen boards made from Juniper. Are they light colored? {like pine, or darker like cedar?]

A bit lighter colored than cedar, as I recall. Been a while, so I'm having to rely on my unreliable memory. Really pretty grain. There was a store in the local town where they had done an entire wall in small pieces of juniper, almost like a brick pattern. Just lovely.

Wood is beautiful. I have a stash of milled walnut that I salvaged from TVA burn piles in the 1970s. Still trying to figure out what to do with it. Some one offered me 2 pecan trees recently felled yesterday. Hmmm. Walnut plus pecan = ????