What’s in a Fedge - part 3
First of all: Happy New Year everyone, and welcome to 2023. May at least some of our gardening wishes come true in the next 364 days.
Secondly: The first big winter storm swept through North West Ohio shortly before Christmas, with the delightfully chilly low temperature of -1 Fahrenheit being hit. This was the day after I tested clear of covid, so I got to spend an hour or so outside shoveling the driveway because my wife’s car got stuck in half an inch of snow. Thanks low profile tires. On the gardening front, the only things that were left intact outside prior to the storm were the very cold hardy plants like the kale, raspberry bushes, my winter rye cover crop, and a few carrots in my dad’s section that he hasn’t harvested yet. From what I can see all of that survived. I need to go out there and check on the garlic though now that I’m thinking about it. I’m not sure that ever sprouted and if it didn’t, well, this may be another year of terrible results with garlic.
ANYWAYS. Moving on to the point of this post, the potting up of the newly sprouted Salix (Flame) willow rods. If you are new to this series of posts it may be helpful to read these posts first: What’s in a Fedge - pt 1, What’s in a Fedge - pt 2, Taking a bit of a Covid Break
Originally I had planned to pot up three of the eight rods, as they were the rods experiencing sprouting and strong root development. This ended up not being what I needed to do because the willow had… other ideas, but we’ll get to that momentarily. With the intent of potting up three willow rods into big enough containers for them to live in for just a single season (since I’m sticking them in the ground come spring) I purchased the following materials:
A twelve pack of one gallon plastic nursery pots with drainage holes and saucers
A two pack of 8 qt bags of potting mix
A ten pack of coconut coir bricks
The plan was to throw one of the coir bricks into a bucket with the requisite amount of water to render it usable, then to mix equal parts coir and potting mix in the one gallon pots to plant the willow rods into. This would create a custom loose potting mix rich with organic material, decent moisture retention, and some nutrients (but not too many) for the young willow rods to thrive in. Since I had covid at the time I needed to source these materials I ordered them from Amazon, which turned out to be good and bad; good because everything was in-stock and showed up fairly quickly, bad because I may (read: definitely) misread the size of the bags of potting soil I ordered. This was a fun surprise for me because the bags I actually ordered were 2 cubic feet each, not 8 qt bags like I had purchased locally previously.
Oops. On the plus side at least I will have some new potting mix for seed starting. Between the leftover potting mix and the remaining nine coir bricks I have I likely have enough medium to start seeds for several years now. I plan to use the remaining potting mix in the spring though just so that I start with fresh materials for seed starting each year.
So here is the process, in pictures:
A breakdown of the process and pictures:
Pictures one and two show the starting state with all eight of the willow canes in their vase, showing both sprouting growth and root development.
Picture three shows my 2.5 gallon bucket with one coconut coir brick and enough water to hydrate and thus decompress the brick so that it’s usable. The amount of water is unknown, it was just slightly taller than the starting height of the brick which started off laying flat on the bottom of the bucket lengthwise. The brick has a stated height of 1.97 inches, so the water would have been about 2.25 inches deep(ish). This water was added as hot as the faucet would go, I just let the bucket sit for an hour or so in the sink. Fluffing it afterwards was very easy and the water had absorbed fantastically. Once fluffed appropriately the coir was roughly two gallons of volume.
Picture four just shows the pot that I went with. I liked that they came with saucers and pre-existing drainage holes which didn’t lay flat in contact with the saucer like you see on some of the cheaper gardening pots sometimes. These pots are thick walled and sturdy too.
Pictures five and six show the first pot filled with half coir and half potting mix, which equated to four handfulls of each in my case. On the first pot I made the mistake of waiting to mix everything together until the pot was basically full, which lead me to make a mess (which you can kind of see in the picture). Subsequent pots I pulled a handful of coir and a handful of potting mix, then mixed them together, and repeated that process until the pots were full.
Picture seven shows the first willow rod when it was pulled out of the vase and separated from the others. Thanks to my camera absolutely refusing to focus properly it shows in much better resolution one of the wreaths my sister made for her wedding last year.
Picture eight shows the first willow rod planted nearly down to the halfway point of the rod. To get all of the roots into the planting hole I ended up twirling the rod a bit like spaghetti noodles on a fork, then gently teased them sideways a bit so that they weren’t in a tight spiral. After that was done I gently firmed the soil down by pressing lightly around the base of the willow rod to make sure that there weren’t any large air pockets around the roots.
Not Pictured: me repeating this process two more times.
Picture nine shows the leftover willow rods, some of which have substantial root development. I decided to pot two of these up as well since I had more than enough materials to do so.
Picture ten shows the end result of five potted willow canes, three of which have substantial sprouting and four of which have substantial root growth. That of course means that one of them didn’t have root growth to speak of as of yet, but I still potted it. This is because it’s the left most pot in the tenth picture, which had substantial sprouting despite no root growth. Everything that I’ve seen so far has indicated to me that willow rods are just about one of the easiest plants to get to root and grow, with people going so far as to claim that all you need to do to get willow to take root and produce new growth is to just leave it laying on the ground. While I haven’t tested that claim specifically (I intend to) this seems to be a great indicator that these five rods at the minimum are destined for growth.
As a reminder, the plan for these rods is to keep them going through the winter indoors, then to plant them out in the spring so that they can get going properly. The canes that sprout over the spring and summer will continue to grow until dormancy sets in sometime late autumn, these canes will be harvested in the late winter sometime in early 2024. These canes will then be cut to approximately one foot long lengths, stripped of any offshoot branches, a forty-five degree angle will be cut in the base of each one foot length, and the rods will then be stuck/planted in the ground to start my makeshift Salix (Flame) bed. Those rods will grow new canes over the course of 2024 which will then be harvested early 2025 in much the same fashion as the canes from early 2024 so that I can properly start my Willow fedge. I’ll be coppicing back the Salix (Flame) bed each year in this fashion until I have the fedge completely planted. After that, I’m not really sure what my plans for the Salix bed will be. Maybe I’ll pull canes from it for basket weaving or something.