Blue Boat Home learning to live together sustainably

Midsummer poses a number of challenges here at our urban farm.  It's when I've finally gotten around to preparing garden beds for sheet-mulching, but that means I need a large volume of green organic matter, as well as the leaves or straw I've saved from the previous fall.  Grass clippings are easy to come by, but they tend to turn slimy and smelly under sheet mulch conditio

The shadow of the neighbors' fence is very visible in this shot. It casts a very crisp frost line in the spring. I located the spiral several feet away from the frost line. It's only in shadow in this picture because the sun is setting.

I did use the level (in the background) a little, but mostly I just eyeballed it.

I've wanted to build an herb spiral since we first moved into the house, but the back yard was such a wreck last year that I didn't get to it until this year. I followed the plan at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Herb_spiral.svg roughly, and will plant it according to that plan. It took about twice as many bricks as I expected, but fortunately we had plenty lying around!