Willow Farm: Year Two
Willow sleeps in winter, but I love looking at these little stools at the beginning of March, knowing they’re going to spring forth with growth in just a few weeks.
Fresh on the heels of a decent first year harvest, I started feeling optimistic about the farm. The harvest yielded plenty of fresh stems to double the field in year two (not to mention yielding plenty of material for actual baskets!!). First things first, though… weeds.
Thinking like a farmer
Toward the end of the first growing season, it became pretty obvious I was going to have to do more about the weeds then just mulch (however thickly) with arborist chips. Before tilling in spring of 2024, the field (as well as much of the entire river valley where the farm is located) was dominated by reed canarygrass, a noxious weed listed by King County. Canarygrass occurs commonly in wetlands as it can handle being inundated in standing water, and it can outcompete native vegetation to create pure stands that unfortunately don’t offer much wildlife value. It spreads by rhizomes, and I can attest after pulling a bunch of it that it has a super robust root system.
When I started the field in 2024, I’d spread 40 yards of arborist chips, but it only covered about 70% of the field (which is somewhere around an eight of an acre). Whatever was not covered by chips was reclaimed pretty quickly by canarygrass (and bindweed to boot). Also, I’d only planted about 30% of the field in willow the first year, expecting to double it in year two. While we’d paid a lot of attention to weeds in the planted area, I didn’t have much energy for dealing with the rest of the field. So, even the part that was well covered by mulch also got filled back in by canarygrass.
I started spring of 2025 with a familiar tool: the lawnmower. Canarygrass is just grass, even if it gets quite tall, so the first step to reclaiming some of the field was to mow, mow, mow. After mowing, I made the decision to go ahead and lay down landscape cloth over the area I wanted to plant for the second season. I originally liked the idea of avoiding a big chunk of plastic, but the reality was not so simple: this was not a garden that I was tending lovingly, it’s a farm field that I need to make sure is productive to help sustain both my art and my livelihood.
So in preparation to extend the rows of willow, I got some help and laid down agricultural grade cloth (which helpfully includes lines which were actually a big help when it came time to plant).
With landscape cloth down, the next step is to plant! I had saved cuttings from the harvest in January to roughly double the number of individual plants in each row. To slip a stem cutting through the landscape cloth, you first burn a hole in the cloth with a blowtorch (FUN!) — this both creates a hole and sears the edge so it doesn’t tear. And then you just go around pounding the new stems into the ground.
By mid-spring, the new willow stems had started growing. The reality of bindweed, though, is that a little landscape cloth is not going to kill it. It started looking for all the holes in the cloth, and climbing up and around the young willows. So the work of the early part of the season was doing my best to keep the bindweed from choking the young growth. Here’s a quick series of pics showing me free one of the plants:
Grow, Willow, Grow!
It wasn’t all doom and gloom and weeds though. The first year willow was doing great. I can’t even believe how much bigger the shrubs were getting, and how many more stems they had. Check out this glorious field of beautiful young willow!
Prepping for next year
Once the new part of the field was planted, and a little weeding was done on the second year plants, it was time to cover the rest of the field to smother the weeds in preparation for next year. I hope to plant a little more willow, but also want to plant some other species that I regularly use and share in my foraged materials craft classes.
In year one, I’d planted a few daylilies and siberian irises around the perimeter of the open parts of the field (two plants whose leaves are incredibly useful for making cordage or using in rib basketry and other crafts). They lived, despite zero help from me, though they didn’t exactly thrive. Next year, I’d like to add redtwig dogwood, and perhaps expand some of the herbaceous perennials.
Before getting there, though, we went ahead and covered the rest of the field with a mix of the last of the landscape cloth and heavy duty tarps. I love the earth, and I love plants, but I hope this plastic smothers the heck out of the noxious weeds so I can do something useful next year.
As of this writing, it’s the summer solstice. We just had a nice rain, and things are looking good. I continue to dream about what all I might be able to do with this winter’s harvest — I can’t really fathom how much more willow I’m going to have to work with next year. Eek!
