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.

Willows, Meteors and Strange Lights in the Sky

I'd like to begin by apologising for the strange indent here on the left. Formatting in Blogger can be a nightmare, particularly placing pictures. When I move them, they often leave this odd little remnant which seems virtually impossible to delete!

As I write this we have finally had some April showers, just in time before May arrives. It has been the sunniest April on record. Whilst we all undoubtedly enjoy the sunshine and it has been a godsend in these difficult times, I don't regard this as a good sign in the long term. We seem these days to get extended periods of weather extremes. Don't forget that before the sunniest April on record we were bemoaning months of wet weather which went as far back as preventing the farmers getting in their winter wheat and left fields flooded over winter.

It's been a tricky time in the garden as it's been too dry to transplant seedlings.

Once the whole plot is covered in compost this will help, but I don't want to cover dry earth with compost mulch as it will just keep the moisture out.

I did manage to get some red cabbage seedlings in but they have required more aftercare than usual.

Instead, I have turned my attention to my various willow structures and coppice. Ideally this is a job for the winter, but I think there's enough time left in the year for them to regrow. They grow at an astonishing rate. The fedge I planted about three years ago around the back of the pond has about 12 foot of new growth. The poles I cut from this will make ideal material for constructing bean supports.









I select the poles I want to use and throw them in with the sheep who make short work of the leaves and side shoots and quickly begin stripping the bark which stops the willow regrowing when it is pushed into the ground.










Any excess willow gets shredded for the compost, although at the moment I am using it as a mulch for the raspberries.

I also pulled a whole load of old teasel stems from a wildlife patch. It stands majestic in the winter, a goldfinch restaurant, but is starting to look a bit messy now.
There was a surprisingly big pile when I had finished. We harvested some of the seed heads for a friend who does flower arranging and then the rest went through the shredder. It dispatches these in no time.






When I'm not at work, I always drift towards being a bit of a night owl. Nocmig (birdwatching in the dark!) has gone quiet so I have taken up astronomy - well, not exactly, it's as much as I can manage to find the North star. But Elon Musk's space junk, eventually to be thousands of satellites, for the moment at least provides the novel sight of strings of satellites passing overhead.
Combine this with the Lyrid meteor shower and you have instant and free entertainment to replace the soaps on TV.

One feature of April 2020's fine weather has been a remarkable series of night skies. Venus has shone brilliant and a crescent moon has made the stars shine even brighter.

In my time I have been fortunate enough to experience some amazing night skies on my travels to far flung and remote places. Most memorable was a night in the open in Egypt's White Desert during a particularly active Perseid meteor shower.

The Lyrid meteors weren't quite so spectacular, but still worth the effort as these experiences in life are few and far between. I got lucky and the first meteor I saw was incredible, a true fireball across the sky. 

There's been something else to look for in the night sky too. A few weeks back social media suddenly started mentioning strange strings of lights travelling across the sky. Fortunately this was not aliens taking advantage of humankind's current difficulties. They were instead trains of satellites launched by Elon Musk.

The geese doing a fairly rubbish impression of  the SpaceX satellite train

I don't particularly welcome this, as it seems like humankind has just found another place to litter and their use seems slightly sinister. There are going to be thousands of them orbiting our planet.

But for now they make quite a unique sight as strings of pearls travel across the sky. Fortunately their initial brightness is short-lived as they move into higher orbit and separate.

The most spectacular thing I saw was one of the SpaceX rockets passing over just 20 minutes after its launch from Cape Canaveral. Though I espouse a relatively simple life, you have to wonder.

Today's swarm of bees, in the same place as the last one

Back down to Earth now and May is upon us. The first day of May has given us another swarm of bees on the smallholding but more spectacular, maybe even than the stars, is the mayflower blossom.

Let's see what this coming month brings us. Right now it seems like absolutely anything could happen.

Chips with Everything ... and Mulch Mulch More

The turkey survived and recovered. I have blocked the offending gap between door and fence panel so she can no longer poke her head through and get stuck.

Before I continue on the main subject, here's a parasol mushroom I happened across today. Incredibly by late afternoon it was withered up and gone.

And here's a lovely picture of Gerry with his head in some catnip.

The new chipper / shredder has proved so popular that I have hardly seen Sue. She has slowly chewed her way through piles of thorny hedge trimmings, prickly roses, willow cuttings... In fact if you stay in one place too long you are likely to be picked up and thrown down the chute!

We have plenty of use for the chippings.

Firstly there is the comfrey patch. Last year's duck destruction meant that for once the comfrey was outcompeted by the grass. It is just poking back through again so a thick layer of mulch chippings will redress the balance.

It won't be long before the comfrey comes through and shades out the grass.

The chippings will give it a helping hand though.

The perennial beds suffer from grass incursion too, so a good few wheelbarrowfuls have gone into there.

And finally I laid fabric protection down for the new willow holt but I used cheap stuff, mainly because I don't like the plastic membrane which leaves long threads of unbreakable plastic in the environment. However the new stuff is thin and the grass has already started poking through. It does half the job, but is really designed to take a mulch - which is exactly what most of it now has. A mixture of grass clippings - a most convenient way of disposing of these right at source - and wood chip has been deployed to make sure the willow cuttings get a good start in life.

In fact mulching is the name of the game this year. But it is important to carefully select what you use to cover the ground and smother the weeds.
For the blackcurrant bushes, it was the bedding from the goose stables since they require a heavy injection of nitrogen.

Blackberries appreciating a heavy feed

The chicken escape committee

have decided that the paths should be mulched

as well as the raspberry beds.

It's easier just to go along with them.

For the raspberries it is grass clippings. Again it is a handy place to empty the mower. The mulch smothers the weeds, especially the invading grass and rots down to feed the soil. It saves hours of weeding in between raspberry canes.

The last two mulches I mentioned, straw and grass clippings, are also ideal for slugs. If I used them on my vegetable patch there would be no vegetables left, even with the help of the duck squad. But soft fruits seem largely unaffected by slugs and the ducks will keep the numbers sufficiently down so this wont become a hotbed of terrorist slugs making nightly incursions into the neighbouring vegetables.

For the vegetables I am mulching instead with compost. The weed-smothering action should again save hours of hands and knees weeding while at the same time the worms, newly encouraged by my no-dig regime, incorporate this black gold into the soil. The mulch will conserve moisture too and feed the plants.

The only problem is producing sufficient quantities of compost to cover all the beds. so I make sure that every single compostable piece of waste makes it onto the heaps. More than that though, I am growing short rotation willow to chip and bulk up the compost heaps. The sheep appreciate stripping the leaves and bark first and the extra supplement they get from this is worth losing a little compost material.
I also have, at great expense, a hundred rhizomes of elephant grass arriving soon. This is a non-invasive variety which is grown commercially to feed biomass energy systems. But I will be using the biomass to bulk up the compost.

If all goes well, we will have mountains of compost. My only worry is that we have too much carbon content and not enough nitrogen content for the compost to rot down sufficiently quickly, but hopefully the weekly addition of old chicken bedding will solve that one.

wwww.Winter Weaving with Willow and Wool

Long, dark evenings
This time of year offers little time for outside work and I am often forced inside by darkness, if not by the weather. I get twitchy on the long winter evenings. I am no stranger to the odd soap opera or two, but I find it hard to sit doing nothing. So winter is a time for planning new outdoor projects and a time for evening crafts and hobbies.
This year I am aiming to teach myself basket weaving. Over the years I have been on a few basket-making courses. Each time I have come back with quite a decent basket and each time I have felt that I could never make another without considerable help from a tutor. But now I have taken the plunge and started to make baskets all on my own. I have only made a couple so far, one from a book and one from a YouTube video. I am still at the stage of trying to blindly follow instructions and mistakes happen. But here are my two efforts.

Not perfect, but still useable.

Basket-weaving is a good hobby for me. I love working with natural materials and I love mathematical patterns. I also have umpteen uses for baskets.

A Holt of my own
So in my usual all or nothing style I have ordered 25 different varieties of willow to grow my own willows for basketry. I didn't know this before but such a willow plantation is known as a holt. At the moment my holt is merely a forest of little sticks lined up and poking out above a sea of landscape fabric. This is a necessary evil to keep competition from grasses and weeds down. I have gone for the thin fabric type rather than the thicker plastic type which shreds strand upon strand of plastic.
The whole is weighed down with old bricks, stones, planks and water-filled bottles. This stops the fabric flapping and tearing or lifting up and damaging the buds of the willow cuttings.

There are over 400 varieties of willow. Those suitable for basketry produce long, straight shoots if grown close together and coppiced every year. Some produce thin rods for fine basketwork, others thicker rods for more agricultural baskets. The range of colours is wonderful, browns, greens, reds, yellow, even blues and blacks.
They are supplied as cuttings, each about 25 to 30cm long. These are just poked into the ground and should pretty much all take root. It will be a couple of years before I am getting a decent harvest.

Until then I will have to purchase most of the willow rods for my developing basketmaking, though I have been cutting back some of my willows which I grow for living willow projects. The thinner sticks and some of the branches rods will be suitable for basket practice. Here they are sorted and ready for drying. Some of the rods will make excellent basket handles or frames for starting baskets.

Short Rotation Coppice
I have also planted an area of fast growing willows for Short Rotation Coppice (SRC). This is grown for biomass, either for burning or for chipping for mulch or to bulk up the compost heap. I should have started all these projects years ago, but I opted for ash trees instead as they are the common local species and are excellent for fire wood. However, the saplings were planted the year before the advent of Ash dieback and have not grown anywhere near as well as they should have, being severely knocked back every year. Unfortunately, tree planting is a long term project.

While I have been working with willow, Sue has been busy with wool. She is a member of the Woolly Crew, a subgroup of Fenland Smallholders Club. Each month they meet and share their crafts. Sue has been using the fleeces from our Shetland sheep for felting and for peg-looming.

There is a very practical side to this as she is busy making rugs for our tipi.

On the left you can see her efforts at incorporating Boris into a new rug design!

Sue has also been preparing a fleece for tanning. This is the fleece from the last sheep we sent off. Sue has been salting the skin for a few weeks and it is now ready to go to the tannery. We could attempt this ourselves but it uses some pretty nasty chemicals and it is difficult to achieve a good result. The tannery we are sending the fleece to is an organic tannery and hopefully the returned fleece will make it all worth it.

Meanwhile winter evenings are for snuggling up warm and cosy too.

Santa makes an unwelcome appearance

Tuesday 4th December 2018
Far-reaching calls through the frosty air
The year marches on. In general it has been mild, but today saw quite a heavy frost which sat around all day.
Birds were on the move all day. Two flocks of Whooper Swans flew majestically over the farm calling to announce their return for the winter. There were buntings and pipits around the smallholding too, but most unusual was a flyover of 21 jackdaws. When even a single jackdaw flies across the open fenland landscape it can be heard way before it is visible. 21 had me looking around for a while before I clocked them heading over the fields.

Where the grass is greener.
Most of today's jobs were minor jobs related to looking after the sheep and poultry. I moved the sheep onto fresh grass. There is still just about enough grass for them as long as I keep moving them, but this cold spell may mean that I soon have to start feeding hay as a supplement.


Turkey escape plans thwarted
Every few days I have to mix up the poultry feed too. Using fermented straights (that means bags of neat grain rather than industrially prepared food pellets) is working well. There's not much difference cost-wise and I won't make any wild claims about glossier feathers or tastier eggs, but I do know that all the birds go mad for it. It also makes me feel more involved with my birds, rather than just chucking processed food pellets in their direction a couple of times a day.
I have also been growing wheat fodder for the turkeys, but it is slower to grow in the cold weather and the turkeys don't seem so bothered about eating it. I'll feed them what's left and then leave it till the spring.
Final job for the morning was to mend the turkey netting for the umpteenth time. There is now more baler twine than net! The trouble is that every time a turkey breaks through a hole in the netting, they walk around on top of it trying to work out how to rejoin the others. In so doing, they create many more holes than the original one.

Santa not welcome!
This afternoon saw an unusual visitor on the smallholding. For drunkenly wrapped around one of the electric fence stakes down with the sheep was Santa Claus! To be more precise, the remains of a foil Santa helium balloon. I do wish people wouldn't celebrate in such irresponsible ways.

A few minutes later another balloon came bouncing across the fields and landed in the dyke. This one was a birthday balloon, but it had a manufacturer's address on. I promptly sent of an appropriately angry and sarcastic email. I did actually receive a reply apologising for the inconvenience. But sometimes an apology just doesn't fix anything.

A palette of willows
Another afternoon arrival was more welcome. A batch of basketry willows. I put them into water ready for planting tomorrow.

More on my willow growing plans in a post coming soon.

Preparing the ground for growing more willows

Another spectacular sunset

Saturday 24th November / Sunday 25th November
I spent a couple of hours fighting with the electric fence!
I am giving over a small part of the sheep paddocks to growing basket willows and short rotation coppice (fast growing willow for firewood / chippings).
Rambo and his harem have done a great job of keeping the grass short so I can easily lay some fabric mulch ready for planting.

I have rearranged the fencing too so the chickens will have access straight into the willow copse. They should do a great job cultivating underneath the willow stools.

Meanwhile Sue has been busy. She finished an experimental circular rug using our own wool which she had dyed, then she turned her hand to Medlar and Rosemary Jelly and Green Tomato and Sultana Chutney.

Sue with Boris, Arthur and Gerry all helping her to make  a circular rug.

ROAD CLOSED - time for a bit of tree pruning

Monday 12th March 2018
ROAD CLOSED - that's what the sign read outside our house. I had been waiting for this, my chance to take off the last few top branches from a willow tree.
This willow is supposed to be a small weeping willow, but it has shot up from the base and turned into a full-scale tree.

But first I decided to move sixteen elder cuttings to their final position. I am creating an elder copse on the edge of the orchard. I think elder is a wonderful plant. It's bird friendly, the berries and flowers are great for cordials, wines and even champagne, as well as pontack sauce. It is easy to take cuttings and the older bushes grow back even stronger when cut.

My new elder copse. It will be impressive in the summer.

I was on Plan B today, for it was too wet and miserable for rotavating the area where I want to sow the butterfly and bee meadow. The soil was too wet and heavy to continue digging the duck pond either.

Our lovely empty road, complete with 

new posts for a new electricity line.

So back to the willow. The branches were rather more high than I remembered and thicker than I thought too. This is probably why I left them last time! But with the catkins coming out, they would soon be in leaf and even harder to deal with. Left for another year they would just be even bigger.
Luckily I had taken off some branches last year, so when I got to the top of the ladder and had to move off it and into the tree, there were plenty of secure places to plant my feet.
I took the job slowly, lopping off the fresh growth first, the wonderfully straight and long poles which had sprouted and reached for the skies from where I had cut last year.
I had three big branches to take off, but did one at a time, stopping for breaks in between. For it is when you are tired and pushing yourself too hard that accidents happen.
This was one job that I was pleased to get out of the way.

The rest of the afternoon was spent sorting the wood I had cut. Logs for the fire, poles and whips for plant supports in the veg garden and the rest for the sheep.

Rambo and his friend appreciated the 

willow I threw in for them.

They especially enjoyed nibbling off the catkins.