Willow Farm: Year One
In March of 2024, I planted my inaugural willow field. As a reminder, willow is planted from stem cuttings, not full willow plants, because it will vigorously root from any decent sized stem if inserted into moist soil. My first cuttings were planted (ie. jabbed into the ground!) on March 2nd, 2024. On March 17th, 2024, my husband and I came back to finish our deer fence, and sure enough, there was growth on those first cuttings already!
Now, it is entirely possible that initial growth was just residual energy the stem had, rather than indication of rooting already, but still! It was a darn good sign, and this girl was over the moon to see those willow babies growing.
In April, I decided to transplant the few willows we’d started at our home garden in 2023 out to the farm patch. In case you’re curious, here’s what the root system on a one year old willow cutting looks like (tap the image to enlarge):
I know that bare-rooting the plants looks like a rough way to transplant them, but if you keep them covered in plastic and out of the sun, the roots don’t dry out and they’ll do fine. And I can report that all of the transplants from the house took off when added to their respective cultivar rows at the farm!
We’d finished the deer fence, and honestly, there wasn’t much to do for a while. April and May are super easy months for everything to grow in the Northwest, with a healthy mix of rain and sun and temps in the 50s and 60s.
Weeds
One thing did start to become apparent though; I was gonna have plenty of weeds! Despite having tilled the field and covered it with four to six inches of arborist chips, within a couple of months there was all manner of the more infamous weeds in the Northwest starting to pop up all around the rows of willow: Japanese bindweed, Himalayan blackberry, reed canarygrass, horsetail, yellow dock… You name it, I had it.
While the field was young and pristine, my husband and I tried to treat it like our garden; we got out there every couple of weeks and hand weeded as best we could, trying to remove the young weeds by the root. And if we had nothing else to do, we probably could have kept up with the weeds this way. But, we had lives to lead. So I adopted the mentality of just trying to keep the worst of the weeds at bay. The willow, which is destined to be a series of robust eight foot shrubs, will ultimately outcompete weeds for water and sunlight if we weaken the weeds while the plantings are young.
So we prioritized digging out every bit of the blackberry, because it’s the worst (and fortunately, there wasn’t much blackberry). The most dominant weed we had was bindweed. So we yanked without pretending to trace back all of the roots, knowing that this would only mean it would eventually grow back. I mostly just wanted to keep it from climbing up and wrapping too much around the young willow stems, knowing that this might scar my precious product!
Summer
By June, it started to look like a gosh darn willow patch. The first year cuttings tend to make three to five stems each, so what you’re looking at in the next picture is rows of wee willow shrubs with a few stems per plant.
And here’s a quick video pan across the field filmed in June. It absolutely fills my heart to see these plants growing and doing their thing!
It generally doesn’t rain in July and August in the Pacific Northwest (average rainfall around one inch each month). So in June I finally started to worry about irrigation. The farm manager at Experience Farm Project (where I had rented my field) let me borrow a big rotary sprinkler that I wheeled out into the middle of the field. In truth, I only had to run the sprinkler twice in 2024, giving the field a good soak around July 1st and then again around August 1st. It was a bit of a weird year, with a bit more rain in July than normal, and summer basically ended the last week of August, with seasonal rain starting early. September is hit or miss in the Northwest, and in 2024 September was more fall than it was summer. I honestly don’t even know if the willow needed the extra irrigation, but as a nervous parent of course I felt I should water them!
Fall
It is hard to believe how much growth these first year cuttings put on. Remember, all the growth in the following pictures is the result of basically shoving a stick in the ground in March, and then having that stick root, start to produce stems, leaf out, and actually turn into a small shrub. Willow. Is. Amazing!!
Here are some pics and video from October of 2024.
First Year Harvest
Basketry willow can be harvested anytime after the leaves fall (which is in November for me), and theoretically anytime before bud break the next spring. In simple terms, harvesting is basically cutting all of the new stems off where they meet the main stem, resulting in cutting each plant back to about six inches – this is a technique called coppicing.
In year two or three, I think I may try pollarding at least some of the plants, instead of coppicing. This means designating one stem to become a leader, cutting it off at a certain height, and in future years always cutting all growth back to that height. This gives you a plant with a taller trunk that you can harvest at chest height, instead of having to kneel to harvest. It also makes it easier to work within the rows to do maintenance, and would give the plants some advantage against bindweed, making it (slightly) harder for the vines to climb up the stems.
I chose to harvest in January. However, I learned something. When my willow was harvested and starting to dry, many of the stems went ahead and set buds (willow has a REALLY strong desire to grow!). Having stems with tiny buds on it is really not ideal for when you want to use those in weaving. So next year, I will do my harvest in December.
Harvest Party
My first year planting was a little over 500 stems, which had turned into a little over 500 shrubs with an average of maybe five stems each, so there were about 2500 stems out there to be harvested. Eek! That’s a lot of snippety-snipping with hand pruners. But also: wow, 2500 stems!! How amazing to dream of what do with that much willow!
To ask less of my husband, and because I thought some of my students might enjoy this, I invited folks on my email list to join me for a day out on the farm to harvest the willow. I was tickled to get a small army of seven lovely ladies who volunteered to help. (If this sounds interesting to you, feel free to join my email list, I’m sure I will ask for help again every harvest.)
Besides just cutting the stems off, we needed to sort the stems by variety, and then by size within each variety, and then bundle them. That way I can store the willow back at home, and when I want to use, say five foot long Dicky Meadows stems for a given project, I can grab one of those bundles.
The basketry willow got harvested in one cold January day (there was actually even some snow on the ground). I was pretty thrilled with the haul! There was enough for me to have to plan out what to use fresh and what to dry for use later on. And of course I couldn’t help but think, if this is year one, what’s year two gonna look like when the plants are producing two or three times as many stems?!?
Decorative Willow
In addition to the specialized basketry willow cultivars, I’ve got one row each at the farm of a few cultivars that are grown for their eye-candy appeal. A couple of these are known for their colorful pussy willows in earliest spring (Mount Aso and Melanostachys), and others for the decorative stems (Red Curly, Sekka).
I went back out on another day to finish the harvest of these varieties. Check out some of these beautiful plants…
Mount Aso
Salix gracilistyla ‘Mount Aso’ (pictured above) is sometimes called Japanese Pink Pussy Willow. The male flowers on a willow are catkins, and the fuzzy sheath on them is what we call pussy willows. The sheath is meant to protect the underlying bud from freezing, as willows make their flowers in late winter or early spring when the weather is still cold. Some varieties have been discovered which have exceptionally pretty pussy willows, and Mount Aso is one of them. It is extra fuzzy, and has a tint of pink which becomes more pronounced as the catkin develops. Eventually the fuzzy layer falls off to reveal the actual flowering part, which disperses pollen out into the world.
Mount Aso is of course brilliant for making either standalone arrangements with its cut stems, or adding the stems to mixed floral or winter arrangements.
Melanostachys
Salix gracilistyla ‘Melanostachys’ (pictured above) is called Black Pussy Willow. Like Mount Aso, it has unique pussy willows, this time black with an underlying red anthers. Depending on the stage of cultivation, they can appear either more black or more red.
Melanostachys is another fun stem to feature in seasonal arrangements.
Sekka
Salix udensis ‘Sekka’ (pictured above) has the common name of Japanese Fantail Willow. Sekka exhibits a type of mutation called fasciation in which individual stems may curve or flatten or appear to be multiple stems fused together, often with accompanying changes to the flowers on that stem. Sekka has to be asexually reproduced (ie. cloned) via cuttings to continue to exhibit the fasciation.
All that science gibberish is a long way to say Sekka can produce some super funky stems, and many humans will celebrate this funkiness as curiously beautiful. Think of Sekka stems as individual little art pieces you can add to an arrangement.
Curly Willow
Last but not least, I have salix erythroflexuosa, or curly red willow (photos above). The young stems, particularly first year stems, are pigmented in varying degrees of red, and also show off twists and turns. They’re not fasciated like Sekka, this is a built in genetic characteristic.
There are endless ways to use these, either in standalone displays like the third picture above, or added to flower arrangements or even summer flower beds to provide a sense of whimsy.
That’s a wrap on season one!
I feel like the first growing season was a pretty great success. Almost every single cutting planted in March of 2024 grew up and got harvested in January 2025, with promises of even better returns in future years.
For year two, I’ve got some work to do. I’m doubling the number of plantings, need to rethink the weed situation, and might not be able to depend on mother nature providing water as well as she did this year. Continue reading year two growing season notes.