3 rows down...

3 rows cleared, 15 more to go. The pile of 
material in the back is what I pulled out of 
just half of the row today.

I haven’t posted lately because I didn’t have any photos to post. There were no photos because the plots were filled with weeds. It was just guilt and shame because we couldn’t go often enough to overcome the insane growth of weeds on that property. It has rained every day for the last month, often 2-3 times per day, and when it’s not raining, it’s blazingly sunny and hot. That’s great for the willow, but the weeds have loved it too. 

The only available space for them to grow is the 3x3” X-cut slash in the landscape fabric each willow stalk gets, and yet, within a week, there’s a mat of at least 5 varieties of invasive weeds and vines. The perimeter is extra thick with the yard trying to invade the landscape fabric. I see we need yet another piece of equipment, a power edger, to keep those boundaries in line. 

These rows of Irette were weeded
last week, so they are not as
overcome by weeds. The straw
has helped a little too.

I can’t imagine trying to grow willow without landscape fabric, by the way. At least for the first two years. And if you notice in the big photo above, the first year Rubykins has resisted most weeds because it grows so quickly and overcomes any competition from the start. My two year olds are still having issues with vines, but they seem to be having less surface weediness, and my older beds just have issues around the borders where they get more light at the base. 

The last two varieties I planted in this new bed are doing the worst, and in some cases, the weeds have effectively covered the willow stalks and stunted them. Both Frances Red and Polish Purple start out the first year puny and small for me anyway, but do better the following years. This year’s new babies have taken some losses already. 

This is Polish Purple, the last variety 
planted in this bed. This is how bad it
can get if you don't keep up.

Of course I have fixes for this problem in mind, using something I have in abundance, felted wool cloth. I made 20 little collars ( I also think of them as dickies) to test the theory that felt would block most weeds and yet pass on moisture and stretch during growth. These are definitely colorful and easy to tuck into the holes around the stalks. If this works as imagined, I’ll make more out of some of the seconds and trimmings from when I was a fiber artist. There’s a nice little closure for you, remnants of past endeavors making humble protections for the current inventory. 

Wool felt makes a dense non-woven fabric. This was a color sample piece I used when teaching. Now it made 15  6" squares for a test of my theory. 

You can just see the collars showing up; see the
'video below for a walkthrough. 

 So, yes, I’ve cleared the 3 rows of Frances Red, put my felt collars to work on half of them and cleared the rest of weeds in those rows but nothing else. An experiment i hope will work. Now, I just have 15 more rows to clear, not to mention the usurpers in the other beds. 

What else are we doing? Still trying to solve the vehicle problem, making do with the trimmer to keep the bed area mowed if not the whole acre. We are also adding an RV pad and expanding the driveway some so that we can finally stay on the property when we need to do a lot of work, like now. I always liked to do a little weeding in the garden in the mornings and we can’t seem to get there earlier than lunch or two days in a row. The drive is just too much, up to 4 hours roundtrip each time. So this will be a big improvement.  

I’ll be weeding for a bit. Photos of cleaner beds and better days to come. 

You can hear our neighbor's dog that we 

call Barky Bark and the Cult Jam, the 

soundtrack for our work. 

2 months later

Once the last cuttings had been planted, at the end of May, the job was to keep them alive through the heat and drought. We had almost 600 new babies and while the larger  bed we planted in March is pretty well established, the May babies had to be, well, babied. We went up to the farm to water twice a week in June. We lost all of the last few Packing Twine cuttings so no new bed for that variety, and a last minute replant of Belgian Red in that place also did poorly, losing 10 out of the 15 we salvaged from our harvest. Amazingly, all 6 of the Brittany Green cuttings survived,  surprising because we cut them off the sad and spindly 3 year old pots. Crossing fingers for those to prosper. 

Probably all of those we lost were too thin, too young or too long in the water bucket. If you read our last posts, you know we had a successful fall harvest for cuttings but we got caught flat footed by the early heat wave to finish harvest and replant new beds.  

So far, all of our newly purchased cuttings are doing well in that same bed. Seven new varieties, different families, 20 of each. The 100% survival is a credit to Dunbar Gardens, the source for these new babies. I’m so interested to see what Triandras and Daphenoides are all about! 

In the meantime, I’ve come up with a plan for water stations we can quickly (I hope) deploy this week while it's still raining. Some numbers on water usage follow, skip to next paragraph to avoid math…

~~~

Apparently, 1 inch of rain falling in 1 square foot of space equals .623 gallons of water.  Assuming that quantity fell on my willow beds (about 4000 square feet), that means a total of almost 2500 gallons, about 2.25 gallons per plant.  This is far and away more water than I can provide by jug watering, or irrigation, even with an array of the big 275 gallon tanks.

My quickly deployed and cheaper water stations use a 2x8 corrugated roofing panel to capture rain, so 16 square feet of area that will capture 10 gallons per 1 inch of rain, but only 1 gallon at 1/10 inch of rain. The limitation is the size of collection panel and the requisite structure to hold it down over the barrel.  The bigger, the heavier, the costlier. 

~~~

 If it just rained an inch once or twice a week, we wouldn’t have to spend time and money to go up there to water or build a system to irrigate. If only!

But there are 3 problems with my rain collection plan: 

1. Our normal weather pattern is  a regular afternoon rain, but at scant quantities - 1/10 inch is common. Every day, but quickly passing. That's what I should plan for.
2. We are currently watering the bare minimum, at about 20 plants per gallon, and we do that 2-3 times a week. To replicate that in a drought, each tank would need 30 gallons  - per week - just to keep young plants alive.  It would take 30 days of rain in the normal rain pattern to save up 30 gallons for any number of water stations to provide one watering for 600plants . When we are in drought, we wouldn't collect any at all. 
3. There’s no telling exactly how much water falls in any given rain event. Being an off-site farmer, we have to estimate based on weather reports, but those numbers are often inaccurate, particularly in mountain valleys like ours. The valley just over the ridge can get soaked while we get nothing. 

I can address the third issue with a rain gauge, though readings will be less accurate if we aren’t taking them every day. I plan to have 3 stations for the new beds, and that will triple the potential collection. And we can always cart up jugs of water to fill the tanks, but that defeats the purpose. 

And possibly the number of stations will be moot if it rains in a big dump like it did yesterday (2.6").  If it rains like that on a regular basis filling the barrels wont’t be a problem or even needed. In fact, this being the Smokies, the environment can get so wet that clouds form off the ground. That was originally the premise of locating in this valley - it’s just off the high mountain ridges and so gets both mountain and valley rain. Willow does really well in this valley as a result. We barely watered at all last summer.

Anyway, having started this post during drought and find myself finishing it during deluge, welcome to western North Carolina. 

Among the tasks this month -  

Cleaning the beds of weeds is going to be ongoing, so I am trying some different solutions to the very determined weeds that poke through the X hole that the willow is planted in. You’d be surprised just how crowded it can get. I have tried loose wool as a mulch, but that has been easily pushed aside so I am trying a few new ideas, including collars made of felted wool, heavy butcher paper and cardboard. I’ll report back on which does the best. 

It seems being a stick farmer, you end up with a lot of sticks. The short branches and discards from cuttings are sitting in piles around the house right now. I need to bundle them up and they could be used for kindling, but I also could make a dead hedge with them, maybe around a compost pile. That’s the current plan anyway. 

We’ve been folding up our DR weed trimmer and packing it up to the farm in the SUV that way. Even if we can’t properly mow, we can trim along the planting beds and our access paths. There’s no progress on our ailing tow vehicle, but this is the minimum we can do right now to keep the planted fields under control. I’ve been looking at used tractors these days for the whole acre, but until there’s a storage shed for that, or a tow vehicle for our utility trailer, big equipment isn’t in the immediate future. Frustrating, but everything has to be done in order. And everything in that wish list costs $$$. 

So another thing we are trying to do is generate money. I am selling off most of my fiber tools and supplies this month at Anything Fiber Sale (Asheville, July 25th). I would also like to sell off my felted inventory as well, and I have a web store for that on the sidebar (on Nice Threads. We are selling some nice stuff on the Tinker and Spinner shop also) Anything you buy will fund our infrastructure and equipment purchases, so thanks for taking a look!!

One other task this summer is to find a local willow weaver to advise us on qualities and suitabilities of the willow we are growing - a Friend of the Farm. I plan to take some classes as well, but I think there might be someone out there who could share some experience that we don’t have yet. If you are in driving distance of Asheville/Old Fort and have worked in willow frequently, we would love to meet you! Please email us if you are interested. 

That’s it for mid-summer. Thanks for visiting.

Hurdles, the kind you make for yourself and the ones you don’t

Our first beds, partially harvested. All the basketry
varieties have been cut, but the landscape ones (tall) 
still need cutting

These past two months have been tough. Actually, the whole brief spring has been one big crisis after another. And I hate that, it was not the plan to be stressed all the time over the farm. I have blamed climate change and that is the largest actor in this situation, spring coming early was and still is, having to be dealt with.  

But we’ve also been hit with both cars needing emergency repair and our farm truck/rv tow truck has transmission problems, death to 20+ year old vehicles. We have had a month of no large equipment - the tiller and the mower - available because we have no tow vehicle for the utility trailer. That has slowed everything down, because we are doing everything by hand. 

And then, finally, it was my bet that we could do harvest and planting in the spring that doomed us. Never, never bet against the weather changing into something you’ve never seen before. It will do something like giving you 88 degree days in March to make you lose. 

I finally found a simple storage idea
for drying rods - a garden shelf on its side.

So here we are. Spring is back, just as the willow is getting used to summer. Several varieties of willow will not get new plantings, some will not be harvested this year, and most of the harvested rods are probably garbage.  I’m just cutting them down to make a record for this year and prep the stools for this year’s new growth. I might try to make some hurdles out of the remaining rods, since that would make them useful. But my plan to double our planted bed area is shot and I see I have to do what the smart people do - harvest in the fall. 

I have heard that cutting rods 
when they have leafed out causes
black spots and discoloration. 

And that’s the learned lesson here, schemes and ambitions fall away before the reality - farmers are always at the mercy of weather, what did I expect? I gambled there would be enough time before full spring to hold out harvesting til the beds were ready. I lost that bet, and now I have to wait another year to get the timing right. 

A hard-won but still not planted new bed

In the meantime, we are finally getting one last bed in. Yesterday we went out for one more try at killing off the carpet of weeds that has invaded our clean dirt. We managed to get one strip of 6 feet, weeds burned off, fabric down, and 20 new cuttings in before we hit a section of hard clay that would not budge. So, we need a tiller, and again, don’t know how to get it up there. 

Truly, this has been a bear of a spring. Hard to believe it's only the first week of May.

These poor Dickie Meadows cuttings have been in
a pail of water for three weeks. They are so ready!

 We did manage to get another new bed completely planted, about 400 new starts. They are doing fine, and the rain this week (finally!) should perk them up a bit. The work of harvesting is continuing. I still have about 8 or 9 varieties to cut and count. 

The price of gas has made each trip up there more expensive, so the planting has to end soon. Here's hoping our luck improves and the weather stays in spring mode!

 

Our finished new bed, 60-70 each of 6 varieties

Last year's babies, this year's two year olds. 
The Miyabeana in back will grow another year,
but the Jaune de Falais in front is shading out the 
Americana in the middle, so they need to be cut.

The way it’s growing

Irette sprouting pink pussy willows, 
gold catkins and tiny white leaves.

Last year, we started planting March 17. This year, we were out there in mid-February and we are still racing the weather. It will get cold again, I think, but either way, the time is now to harvest and replant. 

This is the first year we have more rods than we need for cuttings. If this were another kind of operation - younger owners, more equipment, more money to invest - we’d be planting up as many cuttings as we have available. But since we are just adding about 60 new plants per variety, we need to learn what to do with the balance of available rods. 

Our two most prolific varieties that are mainly for landscape use, Miyabeana and Rubykins, are slated to be used for living willow fencing and a dome. The Rubykins is now sitting in water, waiting a bit til we can work on those structures. Both are showing catkins and buds. 

In the meantime, Irette has catkined out and tiny white leaf buds are showing up at the tips.  There are some long stocky rods that we might use for living willow, but the largest number of Irette rods are 4-5’ and very slender. These, I’m going to dry for basketry. And hope I’m doing it right. 

There’s a big gap in my research on willow growing and that’s in the subject of drying the willow. Not many growers talk about it, I guess because that info comes in the preparation for weaving. But I have so many questions - 

• Laying down or standing up?
• Bundled or loose? 
• In an open carport or shed or in a closed storage room with some ventilation?
• Why do growers stack their willow outside when, for sure, the willow will get rained on? Does it matter? 
• How long do they need to dry?
• How do you tell when they are dry enough to use?

And more questions: 

• Do the catkins dry and drop off? 
• What about the leaf buds - do they shrink or sluff off?
• Or do those ruin the rod for baskets? 
• What is the optimum basketry length and diameter?
• Does it make sense to store different age groups of the same variety together or is the age of the plant significant in choosing for baskets? 

Oh, I can come up with many more questions, but I have kind of a complex about not waiting to learn basketry first before growing willow. Clearly, taking lessons with an established grower makes sense, but here we are in spring and I have willow to store and I just don’t know how best to do that! I would love to hear suggestions!

On another subject, look at our new planting tool!!! I found an ironworker/blacksmith over in Tryon, NC who looked at my sketches and said ‘sure!’ We got two of them, about $100 each, and they work like a charm! The bottom crossbar is for stepping on, the top 2 crossbars are for pulling it out and the handles are for positioning. 10" spikes. Not too heavy for us old ladies, strong enough to make thousands of holes and so easy to use. I can’t thank Saluda Forge and Bill Crowell  enough for coming up with the exact right tool for the job! 

It’s a  summer-like week this week and we’ve only just made a dent in harvesting. Our backs are already complaining, but we are determined. Give me a couple of weeks and see where we are then.  

Spring is Imminent!

Things have slowed down considerably since I last posted. We have had cuttings orders to fill, but the polar vortex intervened and I imagine all anyone could think about was staying warm.  Who's volunteering to dig in freezing dirt, not me! Last week the cold spell snapped and we had 70 degree weather and the forecast is calling for highs in the 60s this week.  Another year of too early spring feels imminent. And we are not ready. 

The willow is hanging tough, though signs of spring are beginning to show. Two varieties have catkins bursting out, with the Rubykins in full pussy willow mode. Just a few Miyabeana are showing the early catkin buds, and they look like copper in the sun, so lovely. 

We have started the living willow dome by marking out the perimeter for planting the rods - that will start this week with the extra Miya and some of the other varieties for color. We also put in some early grass seed for the interior, since the rainy season is beginning.  I'll post as it grows!

It's going to be a balancing act to get the new beds prepped, harvest the old beds, get the new cuttings planted and get some basic infrastructure in to store the harvest, just in time. 

I have been putting ads in Craigslist to offer cuttings and recently put in an offer to pay for a few hours of farm help with $ or willow. No one stepping up yet, but just in case anyone reading this is in driving distance to Old Fort, NC and wants to harvest willow with us, send us an email! We'll be working there starting next week, through March. Come to help a couple of old ladies out and enjoy the wind in the willows - it's a real thing!

Just 3 more weeks to order cuttings!

We will need to close up all cuttings sales in a little under 3 weeks. If you are thinking again about planting willow this spring, check out our willow varieties for sale page. We can harvest and ship as late as March 15th.  And check in on our shop site on March 1st for some deals on cuttings - grab bags with mixed and unknown varieties for half price - $10 per 10 pack, just $1 per cutting. 

Live Rods available now, but only in WNC

If you are in the WNC area and want to put in a living willow structure or fence, you will need living rods instead of cuttings. Unfortunately, shipping 6 ft+ rods is very  expensive, so we will only sell and deliver them locally. Email us with your project ideas and we can give you an estimate. It can cost as little as $20 per 10 foot running length, so consider willow the economy solution for privacy screens and hedges. 

Basketry willow will be available this summer

If you are in the WNC area and are looking for basketry willow, just be a little patient. We will start storing the harvested rods to dry til summer.  Check back with us around June 15th on Instagram or here on the blog to see pricing and delivery options. Or email us what varieties and quantities you need and we can set them aside for you.  

Willow Lessons 2025

This is the year I really got a feel for willow, because the intensity of the first plantings has given way to relief in the second and this year, the third. Like a cat, willow doesn’t really need you.  We had enough rain this year that we had to do very few watering runs.  It was the weeding and mowing that took up our time. 

My schedule now turns on the hope that the spring and summer are rainy and the fall and winters are dry.  Of course, the weather will no longer conform to any pattern so it’s a week to week thing. 

All I can do now during dormancy besides wait for orders and ship dates is to pore over my database and see what numbers can tell me. We have planted 862 cuttings, both purchased (240) and home grown (622) over the 3 years GWF has been operational, about a 2.59 replication rate. But that’s just the gross numbers. I currently have 704 viable plants, a loss of nearly 18%. That’s due to my own inexperience. My first 70 cuttings were in pots for their first year,  and that hampered their growth. (and in fact 4 of the 7 varieties are STILL in pots, so there’s that) That was because I didn’t get the farm property in hand and accessible for another year. And pots are much more work to plant than cuttings. So that first group showed a 50% loss by itself. 

And my second mistake was to not refrigerate my cuttings last harvest  because I thought the weather would stay cold enough. Yes, thank you climate change. We had spring in February this year, about 6 weeks early.  I also didn’t regularly check for mold or fungus, and I lost a few dozen that way, even before the planting bed was ready. 

We managed to finish planting before May, but we had to race to get the last cuttings in the ground because they were growing roots and leaves already.  I had saved the rods on a north-facing  porch, out of the sun, and usually very cold in the winter.  While I cut and stored 685 cuttings, I only planted 604 and currently of those cuttings, only 454 are viable, with 42 more that are struggling. 

Without a dedicated refrigerator,  I couldn’t store them consistently.  For various reasons, I won’t have one this year or probably next. My solution this year is to leave the rods on the plant til mid spring, and just cut as needed for orders and for our new set of beds.  I hope this works and I lose fewer cuttings.  I have also become a bit of a nag on the subject of “plant them right away!” Apologies, I came to it by sad experience. 

Interestingly, one of my original suppliers of cuttings has a 100% success rate; of the 70 I planted, 70 are still viable. The other has a success rate of 82%, for 20 failed planted stalks out of 114. That sounds bad, but I only ordered 10 each of 10 varieties. They sent 14 extra cuttings across varieties, sort of a bakers dozen approach to orders. One variety didn’t grow at all, and maybe they were compensating me ahead of time. That’s one way to control inventory and loss. They also had a fail rate of 18% and they are an established and respected willow grower. But I think the weather can be tricky and likely everyone is caught short in one way or another these days. In that way, all crops grown outdoors are the same. 

Hopes for the New Year - 

A few months ago, a friend gave me some 20 bags of wool skirtings from her Romney sheep flock. My plan this winter is to take up the landscape fabric on the oldest bed and mulch it heavily with wool. To counteract the wind, I’ll cover the fleece with a 1”x2” netting. Hopefully it will mat or felt into breathable and long wearing natural mulch. This is the smallest bed and the wool plus netting plan is experimental, but I’m hopeful that eventually I can get rid of the plastic fabric. 

And the second commitment for the new year is to take a pile of the Miyabeana rods and make some living gazebos and fencing. We have a surplus of Miya - 200 long rods -  and that variety is tall and fast growing. This is going to be the fun part. 

And someday, if it please the goddess, we will get some irrigation lines going and we can stop saving ice tea jugs. 

We are trying to adapt along the way, but I still think, ‘not bad’ when I look at what we did, largely by hand, just two old ladies. And again, willow makes us look good. 

~~~~~

A note on inventory numbers and how squishy they can be.

My inventory count on plants is variable from date to date. I have had plants that looked dead come back to life and I have had whole plants nestled under others that had avoided being counted for months until I cut them back. I can attest how many plants, rods and cuttings I had at harvest last year, but the count varies from that to planting to fall  inventory. The one thing I miss now that I am delaying harvest is having a verifiable number to count at the end of the year.