How to make a TALL herb spiral

I'm planning on building an herb spiral next to my deck next summer.

I would like it to be tall enough to pick from the deck without bending over a lot. The deck is about a foot off the ground.

I want to build a six foot tall herb spiral so I can pick easily from my raised deck.

Ideas: use brick to make tall walls, use waddle fencing to make tall walls
Make the planting bed narrow so there is more rotation in the spiral to reach higher.
Hugelkultur to help with irrigation

I know there are logistical problems with a six foot tall one, but maybe five or four feet tall. I'm shooting for the tallest possible.

Anyone with experience or ideas?

The tricky thing is that the center of the spiral is the highest part, so this have to lean over pretty far. It's the spiral part or the high part more important to you? If the "reaching over to pick an herb" part is more important you could just build a tall narrow hugelbeet.

What Matu said + the top would probably dry out really fast + building at this height would require sore serious engineering and materials, otherwise there is a chance of a washout and mudslide in a strong rain. May be building little stairs to the ground from your porch would work better?

IMHO you are better off growing pots on your deck. As iconic as an herb spiral is within permaculture, it rarely turns out to be a useful design for most people, being prone to wind and water erosion and incorrect/imprecise planting for the microclimates it creates (here's a challenge: see if you can find a design for an herb spiral that says *both* which way is north/sunwards *and* which hemisphere it is intended to be built in! Go!).

And unless you really use all of those herbs, you'll be going to a lot of trouble to plant stuff you will never use, which is not very permacultural. So I feel you would be better off growing plants that you do use in your zone 0, and ones that you rarely or never use farther out in zone 3 or 4, rather than all together in zone 0.

for different reason i too have spent some time trying to figure out how to make a really really tall bed. i was visioning levels though, more like steps.
the best idea i came up with was to use pallets and like ten + bales of straw laid out and stacked up as the base, then get a bunch of soil/dirt/growing medium/etc and put it on top.
though i havent actually fleshed this idea out so i dont know how well it would work.

Hey guys,

Yeah, I think 7' is a little extreme. I think it's totally do able to make on around five feet or six feet.

I plan on using wattle construction, but having all the saplings straight up and down and using twine to connect them. This will make them be able to flex around easily.

I'll also cut windows into the wattle fence to allow a. root growth between the beds for companion plants, and b. planting into the side of the walls to increase planting space.

I'll fill it with rotting logs and use logs to check any soil erosion. I won't make the beds too steep.

I had a lot more ideas but I"m blanking on them now.

Does anyone know if it should go clockwise or counter clockwise for northern hemisphere???

Thanks! Feedback and ideas please!!!

I really don't know if this would help you, but check out which way your water goes down your plug-hole and move from there.

Fiona. observational water movement specialist!