Living Willow fence build.

welcome to arcing world today we're going to look at how to make a living willow fence to give you fast shelter in your ark so living willows is a wonderfully fast wind break and even though it's not ideal because you know you're just basically cloning plants but it gives you this really fast um shelter which will allow other things to take off so it's a really good idea um if you have the space you don't want to have it within 8 to 10 meters of any kind of structures um because willow's very shallow rooted so it can damage the structure of the house um but it's such an amazing plant like you can create living willow tunnels and houses and it's just great crack you know your kids will really enjoy it if you have kids um you can make amazing little kind of hiding spaces for them and things like that but it's also really good um for for insects it's um willow is just below oak in terms of the amount of support it offers to different creatures um not just insects and a wonderful thing about it is you can literally just cut a piece of this wood here and if you shove that into the ground at this time of year between november and kind of i really don't like to go further than the end of february um even though you can apparently but i i never find it works quite as well but if you shove that at least a foot into the ground it will root and then you'll have a new willow plant and the thing about it is because they come they they grow um if you coppice them they grow in these really long um stems and they're very useful for basket weaving and um fencing and things like that and so um this is a really good living fence that we can make and i'll show you how to do it okay so the way it works with willow is you cut one of the stems at the base in the winter like this and then if you shove this in the ground it will root and form a new willow even though it's a clone and it's not as beneficial as a plant grown from seed but for fast um shelter which i seriously need in this field um i'm going to use them to make some fences initially anyway and then as as i can develop more native mixes and things i'll i'll probably cut down the willow and use it for mulching for paths and things later but for the moment anyway it'll be a kind of a quick fix so the thing to do is to shove the willow at least a foot in the ground now you might need a crowbar if you have harder soil and you put the crowbar right down into the ground you can use the lump hammer to get it down and then you pull it out and put the willow in but for me because my land is so soft um it literally is like butter i can just push them in and i push one in and through the grass down into the soil now with all the upright ones i'm going to go across like doing x across each one so this one say here i'm going to go that way a good foot or more into the soil sideways and do an x at the back of it as well as far as i can i'm going to do that the whole way around so i've got loads of string pieces to keep handy to do this so basically the idea is to um is to weave this willow into his money kind of uh smaller sections as possible so kind of it's kind of like weaving um but you don't want the tips to to end up pointing downwards because then they die back so you can kind of go across with them or up with them and um try and make a structure to them mine won't be perfect nothing is okay so i've done a bit there's a little doorway out and um i'll finish the rest of it now tomorrow but this will give you some idea of what i'm trying to do and i haven't finished it obviously so yeah that'll sprout now in the spring and put out new branches and they'll be woven in again next winter and it'll get much much um stronger every year and give us shelter for the forest garden on the other side that's it

Channel: Mary Reynolds reformed landscape designer

Views: 16,172

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Id: 2ZD6DzwVTBc

Length: 4min 50sec (290 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 17 2022