A German Word for Every Little Thing
Spring exhaustion *plus!* a free hügelkultur herb spiral how-to
After an unseasonably warm winter, spring is getting an early head start. The purple crocuses are coming up in happy little clusters. Our patch of land seems to be blinking and squinting in the warm sun like someone turned a light on in the middle of the night. Get up now, already?? The confusion, the frenzied jolt into action. I’m trying not to count any unhatched chickens but the possibility for outdoor work has brought both excitement and panic; joy and despair. Only the extreme sides of the emotional spectrum, which is in keeping with my way of being.
My partner Jordan and I did a walk-through of the buffer zone this past balmy Sunday and boy oh boy do we have work to do this year. The white mulberries and the silver maples are incorrigible, like many-headed hydras there somehow seem to be more of them every week. The bur oak seedling I planted in the fall got its tender tip lopped right off by a hungry varmint. The old red bud desperately needs pruning, seems to be falling apart more and more every year. The rabbit damage is worse than it’s ever been and I feel real silly for not fencing in my baby pussy willows over the winter. We have uncountable hours of work ahead of us. As much as I talked last week about the devotional aspects of tending, I’ll be honest that right now I feel real daunted about the amount of said tending required!
There’s a German word for what I’m feeling (thank goodness the Germans have a handy term for pretty much every complex emotion - it’s extremely validating!): Frühjahrsmüdigkeit, or “spring exhaustion.” For many of us it might be from allergies or daylight savings or the pressure changes from all the big temperature swings. For me, it’s my specific response to feeling overwhelmed. I look at Jordan, for example, for whom having lots of work to do just inspires the dedication of as many hours as it takes to complete all the tasks. Having lots of work to do, logically, means he does a lot of work - he finishes one kind of work and moves right into doing another kind of work. But having lots of work to do inspires the opposite response for me: total shutdown. It makes me want to crawl into a cave and hide forever. It makes me want to transform into a liverwort, without even a vascular system to trouble me.
I’m working on shifting this, by which I mean I’m working on being aware of this response as it comes up without being at its whims. I talked a big game in my last newsletter about coming to terms with just doing what I’m able and in this newsletter I want to tell you that saying “I am coming to terms with just doing what I’m able” sounds easy-breezy but it’s actually pretty fucking messy! Moving towards balance is not, for me, peaceful nor “zen” nor calm. This past week I spent Monday in the grip of some dread-filled agitation that only manically crossing tasks off my to-do list could soothe. The next day I spent nearly catatonic on the couch.
And the rest of the world doesn’t quit either, right? I can’t stop thinking about all the folks who got arrested at a music festival in a public park because they’re associated with wanting to defend the Atlanta forest, now being charged with domestic terrorism. I can’t stop thinking about the mom whose voice cracked as she told the group of people gathered outside the tiny Champaign County jail that her son has been inside for three years, since he was sixteen years old - a small facility with no yard, no way to get outside, not even programs like AA or church, spending 23 hours a day in a cell. The grief of the Bell Bowl Prairie getting bulldozed so Amazon can have a second airport road, of the Willow project getting approved. I feel the rushed panic of spring threatening to burst through me, through all of us, and I can’t contain it so I shut the whole system down. That’s the pattern, anyway.
A long-time friend reminds me that this seems to happen to me every spring, and that is a relief to hear. I am very prepared for depression in December, I am ready to lean in to that dark time! I do not feel bad about all the reality TV I will watch for its duration! But spring depression catches me unawares every time, I think. I get overwhelmed, I lie down, I figure out how to keep going. This is all just to say, no matter how you’re feeling right now, try to let go of how you think you should feel. I’m going to try with you.
Hügelkultur Herb Spiral How-To
This is one way to kill a little bit of lawn and have a thriving herb garden that feed itself for years at a time. It’s a mash-up of two well-loved permaculture concepts: the hügelkultur and the herb spiral. I can’t imagine I’m the first or only person to have thought of this but since I haven’t seen it specifically anywhere in my reading I thought it might be fun to share here.
The hügelkultur is German for “mound culture” or “hill culture.” Hügelkultur garden beds are commonly cut logs covered in dirt with vegetables planted atop. The idea is that over time the logs decompose and release their nutrients into the soil, making them available for the vegetables to feed off of. It’s like a built-in fertilizer system. The logs also hold onto moisture better than just soil, so they help to keep the soil more moist for longer with less water.
An herb spiral is ubiquitous in a lot of permaculture garden plans, and the basic idea is to maximize the amount of growing space into the smallest amount of square footage by using the third dimension (going up instead of just going outward). You do this by making a big big pile, usually three to four feet tall and five feet square, of good soil and compost. Then you can plant herbs from the top of the pile in a spiral row around and around the pile down to the ground - ideally fitting around 30 feet of growing space into this five-foot square. In addition to being able to fit an herb garden into a pretty small space, you also can take advantage of the little microclimates that the various slopes create when considering what herbs to plant (e.g., the slope facing the western afternoon sun will have a different microclimate than the northern slope, which will get less sun).
So what if we combine the two? I will be honest with you that this idea occurred to me when I was thinking about where I was going to get the amount of soil required to build an herb spiral. That’s a lot of soil! I am enthusiastic about killing the lawn but I also don’t want to, like, dig a pit to get enough dirt. I know they’ve got bags of soil at the hardware store but I try to use the hardware store as a last resort for things that I don’t have and can’t make here at home. We have a TON of cut wood from fallen branches here - an excess, you might even say. So the hügelkultur herb spiral was born.
Here’s how you can do it yourself if you want to try:
First, mark out your five foot square on the ground. If you are, in fact, murdering a patch of lawn, put a layer of (non-glossy, not very inked, tape and stickers ripped off) cardboard to help with keeping the grass from trying to reclaim it.
Make a bottom layer of (unsprayed) logs that mostly fills the square. Add a layer of dirt to the top of this just so there aren’t any gaps between the layers of logs.
Now we’re just building a log and dirt pyramid, so make a smaller layer of logs on top of the first. Cover that in dirt, too.
Repeat till you’ve got a little pyramid and cover it in some more dirt if you need to make the sides smooth, more hill-like. Add a layer of compost and a thick layer of mulch.
Note: the book that I followed most closely for the herb spiral instructions, Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway, recommends making a spiral out of “football to fist-sized rocks” winding up and around the mound, then planting your plants in between the rocks. I think this could look really beautiful! I did not do this.
Now you need to know who’s getting planted where in the spiral. This is the most fun part to me. Consider the different amounts of sun that each side will receive (e.g., the north-facing slope will probably be a bit shadier and therefore cooler, so you’ll want to put plants that are more shade tolerant there - or ones that will bolt in the hot sun, like cilantro). Consider also that the top of the spiral will generally stay drier than the bottom of the spiral, because of how gravity works on rain. Top of the spiral is great for a plant like lavender - I even mixed a little sand into the soil around mine when I planted it to help with drainage.
Here are some very well-used drafts of my herb spiral plan - you can see me changing my mind about it in the process (i.e., this is not exactly the plan I executed) as I carried these papers around with me while I started working.
‘Bones’ is short for boneset *don’t worry!*
Next, procure and plant your plants based on their requirements and your planting plan. I ended up going with lavender, two kinds of basil, green onions, St. John’s wort, lemon balm, and rosemary (not in that order).
Et voila! Enjoy all your fresh herbs!
If you want to try this herb spiral but you have questions about it - before you start or as you go - please don’t hesitate to email me! Unsolicited recommendations return in the next newsletter, but by all means send me yours in the meantime.
Thanks for being here - see ya in a couple weeks.
Mere