Step 1 of our Bottle Brick Spiral Herb Garden

 

My son-in-law Micah Weiss loves building things and took an interest in solving my multi-year dilemma about virtually every bottlebrick construction project I had lined up failed. Small NGOs have a constant turn-over of staff. Public schools are underfunded. Our champion at a summer camp moved on and the hundreds of bricks were orphaned. COVID. Etc.

Micah wanted to build an herb garden and when I told him about the permaculture spiral design he was intrigued. 

He evened up a circular spot and I laid out about 5+ 20 oz bottle bricks. (Step 1).

My mother's day gift was to mortar two tiers of bricks to create the holder for the spiral.

Micah mixed up on bag of mortar. What's the difference between cement and mortar? Not much!

We didn't worry about the bottle cap end since it will be covered by the soil we add.

The wide variety of colors in the bottle's bottoms is actually pretty cool looking!

We used trowels and glopped the mortar over the bottles, pushing it in between them to hold them in place, and adding more on top to create a base for the next tier. The bottle bricks are sitting right on top of the soil to increase drainage. 

Then the three of us repeated the process, adding extra mortar on top to leave a fairly smooth base for what comes next, building the spiral. The whole process took less than an hour, not counting five years worth of bricks!

My initial opinion was to eventually cement the exterior of the bottle brick bottoms but we all kind of like the way they look.

To be continued.