How this started
Owning a small family farm in the States is a difficult economic task. Food prices are low. Commodity crop values swing precariously. Climate change is making growing seasons and farming success more and more unpredictable every year.
Diversifying what you do is definitely key to staying afloat so that you’re not relying on any one thing to pay the taxes on the land and pay workers. But diversifying also means additional expense in specialized equipment or maybe even specialized employees. And the growing season—which in the Midwest is most especially late April through mid-November with the most activity in the summer months—is already so jam packed with work that it’s hard to add on additional products or projects.
This is a rough summation of the thoughts I was having while staring out at a lowering late November sky, hanging over the wooded hill at the back of the reclaimed gravel pit on the west end of my family’s farm. It’s a pretty spot—a tall wooded hill called Mt. Nebo at the very back of the property, rolling down to a forty foot wide gently sloped flat and then a swift tip down another hill into the bottom of the pit. That second hill is covered in native wild flowers and invasives like the Bradford Pear tree.
So what can we do to lengthen our growing season? To add products or projects in the winter?
My brother had already built two high tunnels to grow greens during the winter and get a jump on and extend the traditional growing season. He’s also been working on making vinegar and starting a distillery. But those things aren’t a good fit for employees who like digging in the dirt and working with plant harvests.
Now, how I jumped from that thinking to thinking, “Eureka! Pussy Willows!” I just can’t remember. But it turns out, as I started my research, they fit the bill perfectly:
Pussy willows are planted before the regular growing season begins
They grow with almost no attention needed during the regular growing season.
They’re harvested yearly in February or early March.
Unlike other cut flowers they have a real shelf life and store and ship well.
They also propagate like weeds, so that if we could build a market and see it grow, it would costs virtually nothing to scale up.
Yay!
But while doing my pussy willow research, I discovered basket willows—which, by the way are not mutually exclusive plants. I knew nothing about them. When I saw a willow basket, I always just assumed they were made of weeping willow branches. Nope. I also thought the willow folks used for baskets pretty much came in two colors—whiteish or that dark brownish/purpleish/deep reddish color. Also nope.
I fell down a rabbit hole. I read about the seemingly infinite number of basket willow varieties out there—that seem to come in close to every color of the rainbow. I watched videos about their farming and about basket weaving—mostly from British or Irish farmers and craftspeople, so the lilting accents certainly helped in winning me over. I read about the basket willow’s ridiculously fortuitous growth habits—an upright shrub that, when farmed, is planted in tightly to encourage tall and thin branch growth.
They are propagated by literally sticking a living one foot long stick into the ground. Preferably, in merely adequate soil. No. really.
And they grow 4-10 feet a year and are harvested yearly. All of the willow rods are cut essentially flush to the ground. And for this rough treatment, they repay their farmer by multiplying the amount of rods they throw off year after year.
Willows are the base ingredient in aspirin. They can strengthen river banks and control flooding. They provide excellent forage for ruminants and—with lesser success—horses and donkeys. They’re great for baskets, but can also be woven into fences and hurtles and small structures. And because they can grow from a stick, they can also easily be planted en masse and braided to make living fences and canopies and, I expect secret forts and she sheds.
And, beyond all of that usefulness, basket willows are beautiful and elegant. In a long willow bed of hundreds of willows, their long slender branches bend and sway in the wind making a shushing susurration that is calming to behold. This may be where things get subjective, but that whispering sound they make in the wind, and the woody knocking sound they make when harvested and carted up a hill on my shoulder and then the sharper clacking they make once dry and headed for the soaking tub? Some of the best sounds in the world.
They smell lovely too. . .
The point being, I’m hooked. I meant to grow a patch of pussy willows and instead planted 65 basket willows as an experiment in early 2020 to see if they would grow as easily as described. . . and also to figure out if I loved them as much as I expected I would.
Early 2021, I planted 500 more. And I have plans to plant 1200 more in early 2022, with the expectation that I will only continue to plant more and more and more until I have 7-10,000 plants total.
I have acquired two mentors (both of whom I will discuss in a later post):
Hanna Van Aelst—a brilliant artist and weaver and teacher and farmer in Ireland who you can find on YouTube and her website where she sells her work and offers completely wonderful digital courses for a fee that are worth every penny. She seems infinitely kind and generous with her knowledge—in so much as I can know her digitally from thousands of miles away—and knowing her is what I have decided the internet was invented for.
Howard Peller—an equally brilliant artist and weaver and farmer here in Ohio as owner of Living Willow Farm. I have not learned weaving from him yet—though I intend to—but he is who I have sourced both willow cuttings and weaving rods from in the States. He is wonderful, as his family, as is his farm, as is his small wolfy dog “Willow.”
And I’m slowly becoming part of an international community of basket weavers and willow enthusiasts. Having this obsessive pursuit during the rise of the Covid pandemic was certainly a boon, but I expect willow would have captured my attention regardless of an international shut down.
This is how it started. And I can’t wait to see how it continues.
