Willow Community

Abby, Julie, Karen, Mary, and Catfish holding their “catch of the day”.

Thanks to finding Hanna Van Aelst on my initial down-the-rabbit-hole basket willow discovery dig during Covid in 2020, I am lucky to be part of an international group of willow makers and growers. All Hanna’s students, we meet on zoom once a month to share what we’re working on and to ask questions and to get to know one another a bit as humans. I’m a huge fan of accents—American regional accents are wonderful, but also accents from abroad—and so listening to everyone talk is a special joy above and beyond the gift of getting to digitally socialize with people who are as nerdy as I am about willow and weaving.

I missed this past month’s meeting, though, because the meeting fell on a day when the horses were out and fine. . . and then just an hour after turn out, on a perfectly sunny day, the river started to swiftly backfill the horses’ pasture. We’d had rain the night before, but the sudden arrival of water was likely an indication of dams and locks south of us being shut for water management. Surprise.

So, I had other pretty pressing work to do and couldn’t attend.

I hate to miss the zooms. But as a comfort, I feel like I’m just on the cusp of starting to develop a willow community right here at home. It’s slow going, and, truth be told, I’m not working very hard at it, but people are beginning to find me and the farm and get interested in this wondrous plant.

I taught a class to the Cincinnati Harriet Beecher Stowe House garden volunteers. Such a kind and funny group, who learned how to make garden supports on a cold blustery winter day. There were students in my Brigid’s Cross class who had met me back during the summer when I had a bunch of folks play with sticks at Sayler Park Sustains—super flattering. And the Cincinnati Nature Center is considering planting their own native willow beds to harvest yearly and get to teach their members cool things to do with sticks too and have reached out to me for information about growing willow and possibly to purchase starts.

Harriet Beecher Stowe House Garden volunteers rising to the challenge of their first willow weaving adventure

The Cincinnati Nature Center doesn’t know it yet, but once they open that door to me, I’m probably going to keep my foot in the crack and try to be as helpful and involved with that as I can. They own a farm property outside of the Center everyone is more familiar with, and I think a farm with no willow growing anywhere is a sad thing indeed. I hope that relationship goes somewhere, because I adore them and their mission. And that’s an org that could grow a lot of willow.

I taught a class recently in farming willow, and now some of my horse barn boarders are growing 100 willows in their backyard from starts from my plot, planted just this past weekend. I feel like a weird little willow fairy who is just slowly but surely sneaking willow back into the farming and growing of the Ohio River Valley. I’ll get a toehold anywhere I can—one backyard, one farm, at a time, until nobody needs me any more.

Willow farming class. Everyone got to harvest, plant, and grade.

Generous Farm friends have pitched in a bit with harvest of the willow this year. Friends of mine and my brother’s who are all outdoorsy and green-thumbsy and just the best at cutting sticks the right way. I feel so lucky to know them all and especially currently lucky that they want to chip in on the harvest that, thanks to a foot and a half of snow that went nowhere for weeks and also that my harvests are just starting to get BIG, is a bit overwhelming and deeply delayed.

And Abby, sweet Abby, just let me know that she wishes she could work full time on the farm being a wood monkey (hers and my father’s Chinese zodiac animal and earth element) doing willow work and whatever other weird thing I decide to do. I can’t afford her just yet. But with the time I can afford to have her, we will be scaling up in planting and plans and creativity to think of ways to make that happen for her and for me.

I’m a slow mover. I have professional experience working for places that have GREAT IDEAS and all the right people to put them in place, but not the forethought to think about how that work can be made sustainable year after year. I don’t want to fall into that hole in my own growing businesses. And so I scale up quietly and slowly as I can afford to. . . Or afford the debt to. But I feel cautiously ready to go bigger and open willow and myself up further to more opportunities.

It’s exciting and a little terrifying. But mostly exciting. Willow continues to attach me to deeply lovely people and fun projects. I’m here for it.

Now if only I could just get harvest and grading finished.