With all the warm weather (and all the rain) in the past week, the farm is really starting to pop! Last fall’s kale is up, the strawberries are setting fruit, and the beds are finally dry enough to start working for this year’s annuals.

With everything waking up for the growing season, it’s perfect timing for the start of our “internship” program with our Cape Cod Collaborative high school students. Each week, a group of five students gets the chance to spend their school days at Camp. They start each day by stopping in to complete farm chores, and then after a block of academic work they participate in hands-on “internship” projects that help keep Camp running smoothly. Students rotate through positions with our maintenance crew, the kitchen staff, the outdoor education gurus, and (of course!) the farm team.

Today, our interns helped construct an herb spiral in the outdoor kitchen. An herb spiral compacts many linear feet of growing space into a space-efficient circle. In addition, the bricks that make up the walls of the spiral collect heat from the sun during the day, then slowly release the heat into the soil at night, helping keep plants’ roots warm and happy.
Check out our process below!

First, we used a piece of rope and some stakes to mark the edges of our circle. Then we laid cardboard to prevent weeds from taking over. An added benefit of the cardboard is that worms LOVE to hang out under it, so we’ll attract some awesome decomposers to the bed!

Next, we laid our first layer of bricks.

After the bricks came the first load of soil (which was a mix of soil from a stump dump behind Base Camp and compost from a pile behind the greenhouse).

We alternated adding a new layer of bricks with a new load of soil until it was complete!

The next step will be to plant it with delicious culinary and tea herbs for folks to use in the outdoor kitchen. Yum!