Whips and butts - My basket willow holt

Winter is the time to work on the trees on the smallholding. Deciduous trees are dormant which means they can be moved, planted, cut back and most of them can be pruned.

Coppicing and pollarding are ancient ways to manage trees. Coppicing just means cutting the tree right back to the base. How often you do this depends on the species of tree and what you want to use the coppiced wood for. It works because a developed root system puts all its energy into producing multiple fresh shoots from the coppiced stump. These grow straight up and uniform and are easy to harvest.

Pollarding is basically the same, but a trunk is left on the tree and the cutting back performed a few feet up. This is particularly useful where the young shoots might come under grazing pressure from rodents, anything from voles to rabbits.

One type of tree which grows back particularly well is willow. Today I want to talk about my basket willows. These are species and varieties of willow chosen specifically for the colours of their stems and for producing multiple stems suitable for basket weaving.

Basket willows are cut back every year. Gradually a decent stump develops from which spring multiple stems every year. Growing them close together encourages the stems to reach for the sky. If not cut, the stems will branch in their second year, which is not what is needed for weaving.

Several years ago I purchased quite a few varieties of willow. These are purchased as pencil thick cuttings about 10 inches long. All you do is poke them into the ground and they should root. 

A little extra care helps them settle in and grow stronger. They need protection from grass growth and may need some watering until they develop their root system. I underestimated the importance of this extra care so, in my weedy and windswept site, establishment has been slower than I would have liked. Most people plant through weed control fabric, but I have come to hate this stuff. It just deposits hundreds of long thin strands of plastic into the environment, eminently dangerous to wildlife. Instead I purchased some cheap fleece-like fabric, but it just didn't do the job and the weeds took over. I hoped that the chickens scratching about under the trees would help with this too, but they rarely go there and prefer to make a beeline for the veg patch whenever I accidentally leave the gate open.

As for watering, that's not going to happen. They are far too far from any convenient source of water.

I started with between 5 and 100 of each variety. Some did really well, others really struggled or even died out. Every year I cut them back and use what I've cut to make more cuttings, with the aim of multiplying the originals into long lines of maybe a hundred or so of each variety.

Cuttings taken from this year's growth are used to multiply the willows many fold.

Over a few years the successful ones have grown stronger and stronger and now give excellent material for new cuttings. However, the drought of 2022 meant that almost without exception the cuttings from 2021 failed. 

Anyhow, I feel that I am now getting somewhere.

The arrival of lorry loads of woodchip has helped. This is excellent as a weed-suppressant mulch and holds the moisture in the soil too.

So this last week I have been extending my basket willow holt. I have simply spread woodchip over the existing grass and then planted my cuttings straight into it.

 

I simply poke the cuttings (the right way round) into the ground, leaving them protruding so I can see where they are going. I then have the laborious and painful task of pushing them all down into the soil. Gardening gloves help, but it's still sore on the palm of the hand.

I've purchased several new varieties as well  as replacing a couple of varieties that I had completely lost.

I have managed to harvest enough of some types to be useful for basket making, but for the moment I will still be reliant on using bought in willow for this. By next year I would very much hope to be producing enough for my own use.

I also intend to start selling cuttings of named varieties. I now have over twenty different varieties.

A Frost Sets In as thoughts turn to Spring Growth

We're in the middle of another cold snap. Days and nights have been crisp for almost a week now and the ground has remained solid.

I'm well aware that there may be people around the world reading this who would barely raise an eyebrow at this, but temperatures have been down to 5 and 6 below at night (Centigrade, not Fahrenheit). And today, for the first time in this spell, the temperature never actually rose above freezing point even during the day.

Amazingly we've not had a flake of snow yet this winter, but the seasonal chill is on the whole welcome. We don't always get seasonal weather any more, or at least it comes in the wrong season.

Unfortunately I am now of the age where the cold very quickly gets into my bones, though I'm OK if I wear five or six layers of increasing thickness. My fingers suffer though and I find it difficult to do any gardening chores with more than one pair of gloves on. I have however discovered that I get A LOT fewer cuts and grazes on my hands when I wear a pair of work gloves.

Jobs on the list for this week were (with the emphasis on were) pruning orchard trees, coppicing willows and planting new cuttings, shifting more woodchip and digging up some of the tuber crops such as Chinese artichoke (crosnes) and yacon. Unfortunately none of that is very feasible when the air is icy, the ground is rock hard and there's a good couple of inches of ice on all water surfaces.

So instead I've turned my hand to seed sowing. Last year I played it patient, went late on everything in the knowledge that it would catch up and overtake and that seedlings wouldn't end up leggy. As it turned out, we didn't have a single frost past the end of April and hardly even any during that month. Then there followed an extended period of drought culminating in a summer where the thermometer tipped the scales at 40 degrees (Centigrade again!). This, for Britain, was a record.

I wished some of those seedlings had been further down the road. Many perished in the heat and the dry conditions and it was too late to start again.

So this year I am displaying a massive over-reaction and going super early with everything. I've got a huge choice of set ups to regulate seedling growth (all improvised, no fancy grow-lights or anything like that, just different rooms, different temperatures, different light levels, different protection). And if we get failures, at least there'll be time for another attempt.

I have already sown 12 types of onions. They are on heat mats until they germinate, then they can move somewhere a tad cooler. I've sown quite a few perennials too - in general they appreciate a period of cold before the germinate as the soil warms up. Next it will be aubergines which require a long growing seasons but will need to be mollycoddled through to May like the tender little things they are.

Meanwhile I am trying to think of an easy way to transfer some of the heat from the woodchip piles to the polytunnel. In one place I've got 50 degrees centigrade of smoking heat. Not far away I've got temperatures hovering around zero. 

There must be an easy way.

This year I am going to be super organised (I've never said that before!)

Anyway, I'll leave you with another picture of today's hoar frost.

Getting the plot ready for a new growing season

Winter is a time to catch up and to get everything ready for next year. 

Last year's failures and disappointments can be left in the past as we optimistically plan for the year ahead, a year of bountiful sunshine and rain in perfect proportion, a year where we finally keep up with sowing schedules, remember to keep seedlings watered but don't drown them, keep on top of the weeds, keep up with harvesting and even keep on top of succession sowing and planting.

And that will all start with getting the beds prepared in plenty of time for spring. For some that will mean digging over so the frost can (allegedly) break the soil down or rotavating to start the year with lovely, clear beds. The conscientious will work in manure or ample compost. 

None of that for me though. I want to keep the soil covered to protect it from being beaten down by the worst of the winter weather. It won't be turned, but protected from the elements it will emerge from the winter with a crumbly surface. Most of my annual beds are currently covered with homemade compost or, when there wasn't enough of that, for there never is, a deep layer of straw. This was a choice which was made for me thanks to the cheapness of straw in this area - we should always aim to use whatever is locally available. If it's not sufficiently rotted down by sowing time, I'll rake it off the surface and add it in to the compost piles. 

Rhubarb is already coming up, though it may get nipped back if we get anouther cold spell

In the forest garden, most of the herbaceous plants have retreated under the surface for the winter. But as the rays of spring sunshine hit the ground strong, fresh shoots will appear. For the moment I am keeping the perennial beds well mulched. For this I use woodchip, which I now have in more than plentiful supply. 

Plenty of woodchip and logs to be getting on with!
Can you spot the robin?

Under the fruit bushes I am actually using freshly shredded leylandii. It's still producing a lot of heat, but this will quickly dissipate once it's spread out over the ground. The primary purpose of this is to suffocate the weeds, starving them of light and stealing their nitrogen as the decomposition bacteria get going. Keeping on top of weeds, especially grass growing up through thorny gooseberry bushes would be a nightmare without mulching. 

Woodchip makes an excellent mulch for the raspberry beds.

It will decompose quite quickly and put its goodness back into the ground. I won't need to dig it in, for the worms will do that and its nutrients will be made available to all my plants by the magical processes which are allowed to go on in the soil when it is not repeatedly turned and disturbed by constant upheaval. I'm talking not just worms and minibeasts, but fungal mycelia and bacteria. For the cycle of nutrients, with a little encouragement from us, is much more efficiently handled by nature. No need for simplistic additions of fertiliser backed up with liberal dowses of herbicide and pesticide to eliminate all 'competition'. Nature achieves all of this in a much more complex way. I don't even need to completely understand everything that goes on, in the same way that I don't have a clue how my car or this computer actually work.

Logs and woodchip are now being delivered to the smallholding with alarming regularity! I don't want to turn it away and have plenty of use for it, especially the woodchip, but it is keeping me busy redistributing it around the whole smallholding. It might help me with my resolution to shed a few pounds.

The logs will of course be handy for heating the house, but some are just too big to handle so they will be left for wildlife. Much of the wood needs to season too and I am not keen to use the leylandii in the woodburner. It needs at least a couple of years of seasoning otherwise it's guaranteed chimney fire! Given the amount of wood now coming in, I won't need it for this, so we have multiple woodpiles appearing all over the smallholding. The wildlife will love it. 

I've found another great use for the leylandii logs though. It makes a great edging for perennial beds. It's not too formal but does just enough to define the areas so they don't seem too messy amd random. I don't really do formal, but a degree of organisation and layout is necessary to aid tending plants and harvesting. 

I have decided to create some beds which come somewhere between annual veg beds and forest garden. These are my beds for perennial veg. Here will live Jerusalem artichoke, Turkish rocket, herbs, perennial kales, 9-star perennial broccoli, Chinese artichoke (crosnes). Many of these don't need the intensive input of labour demanded by annual crops, but they don't really fit into the randomness of the forest garden, especially as the canopy closes over and sunny edges become more limited.

The only things that stop me getting more done during the winter are the limitations of my ageing body and the frustratingly short days. 

But as you can see, I've been a bit busy. Before I know it though, the sowing schedule will be ramping up. At the moment it is mainly perennial seeds which are stratifying, the process by which they are sown early enough to experience a protracted cold period. In nature, they need this before they germinate. It is nature's way of making sure that seeds shed in the summer and autumn don't germinate too quickly before spring arrives.

My seed potatoes are arriving this week, which is a sure sign that the main sowing and planting season approaches. Fortunately hours of light increase roughly in line with the amount of work which needs doing... thinking about it, it's probably the other way round, it's the increasing light which heralds the need to prepare beds and get sowing seeds.

And so 2023 is under way!

Good luck everyone.