One thing I love doing with plants and trees is propagating them. Scottish people have a reputation for being frugal cheapskates – Aberdonians even more so, so getting more plants at zero cost brings an understandable amount of joy.

“I can get unlimited trees – for free!?”

By far the easiest to propagate, of any plant or tree I’ve attempted – has been willow. A notable mention also goes to mint which can easily be propagated in water, root within a few days and then spread like wildfire in your garden.

I have to give a shout out to the landlord of my previous residence in Aberdeen who’s no doubt still dealing with a garden overgrown with mint by now, from the 10+ mint bushes I propagated from a single Tesco mint plant. At least it smells nice!

Why willow?

So many reasons! Willow has an almost endless list of uses and applications. Combine this with the fact that it’s easily propagated and grows at a ridiculous speed, it’s an obvious choice.

Growth rate

I’m not sure how Willow stands in the league table of speedy growers, but I’m guessing it’s near the top. This stuff grows like wildfire when propagated from healthy branches. I’ve read that the larger the cutting, the more “energy” (nutrients, perhaps?) the cutting has to produce new and large shoots. If you get something in the ground over the winter, you’ll have long shoots of growth starting in the spring which could be a couple of feet long by mid-to-end of summer in my experience.

Raw material

Willow is a great raw material – a resource that’ll probably be increasingly valuable to have on-site in the future apocalyptic climate wars (which I’m very much looking forward to living through.).

Even if we do get our act together and avoid climate-induced societal collapse – how great is it to have a never-ending, private supply of wood? It can be coppiced each year with the larger branches being used as renewable sources of firewood. Larger willow stakes are often used for fencing, and more notably in river bank strengthening and restoration where stakes are interwoven with each other. The stakes then take root and strengthen the banks to stop erosion.

SEPA have some guidelines on “Sustainable riverbank protection” which I came across, and willow plays a leading role –

• Sustainable riverbank protection – https://www.sepa.org.uk/regulations/water/engineering/sustainable-riverbank-protection/
• Guidance document – https://www.sepa.org.uk/media/219450/bank_protection_guidance.pdf

Willow is also pretty flexible (when freshly cut – not completely dry) so the smaller branches are often used to make woven baskets and similar items.

Then, there are the medicinal benefits – it’s probably not something you’d use it for today unless we had the aforementioned societal collapse, but willow bark used to be chewed for pain relief before aspirin was a thing, and the compound found in willow was actually what aspirin was derived from.

One final benefit of willow is that it acts like a sort of Miracle-Gro. Willow contains so much growth hormone that you can leave cuttings in water for a few days and create a homemade rooting hormone which can be used to help speed up the rooting of other types of plants or trees. Amazing stuff!

What kind of willow?

I’ve personally tried goat willow and white willow and found them both to be pretty prolific. Always best to stick with native species of course.

How to propagate?

The best cuttings seem to be ones which are at least 1 year old – so don’t go cutting fresh, green shoots. Anything older than a year simply needs to be immersed in water, and it’ll start rooting everywhere. I’ve done a mix of starting the rooting in buckets of water and then popping them in the ground, and also just stabbing them into the ground in a boggy site. They do best in soil that’s waterlogged.

If you have larger “cuttings” – like an actual log that’s too large to stab into the ground, what will also work is just laying it flat on a wet area of ground – or leaving it in a wet ditch.

Resources

Cairn of Dunn Croft is a great permaculture resource if you like getting info from Youtube – they’re based in the North of Scotland in Caithness – so very similar climate conditions to the Hebrides – and also have a ton of content on willow –

• Growing free willow trees – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To9vxvvFyeU
• Cairn of Dunn Croft – https://www.youtube.com/@CairnOfDunnCroftPermaculture

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Last year I added some tubex tree protectors to several trees on the croft.

Initially, I thought these only had one purpose – to protect the trees from grazing animals, until they reached a certain height.

I only later learned that they create a microclimate for the trees and actually act like mini greenhouses. On a day with even a little sunlight, you can feel the heat rising out of the top of them. On top of this, they also encourage your trees to grow straight upwards which is useful if you want to use them for building materials or just want them to look uniform.

I only added protectors to about half of my trees, and the ones which did have them clearly grew a lot faster and stronger. This year I’ve just gone ahead and added more, so hopefully they’ll all get a well-needed boost when this cold spring weather disappears.

Where to buy

I bought mine from Christie Elites, which is also where I get all of my tree saplings. Worth noting that they’re usually sold out after spring so best to grab them early.

Installation

They come in varying sizes, 0.6m and 1.4m – I go for the larger ones to keep them out of reach of our sheep. I’m not sure what applications the smaller ones would have or why you’d use these over taller ones – perhaps for shrubs that only reach a certain height?

Installing them is pretty simple and only requires a wooden stake and a large hammer for driving the stake into the ground. The tubes come with two cable ties attached which tighten around the stake. It’s not rocket science but the below might save you a few minutes, and a few swear words.

1. I normally put the tube around the tree sapling first so it’s positioned correctly. If you hammer the stake in first, it could be too far from the tree base meaning the tree has to bend to fit into the tube.
2. Then put the stake through the cable ties, keeping the stake flush against the tube and making sure you have both as straight as possible (can be tricky if you’re on a slope).
3. Hammer the stake into the ground, ensuring you don’t damage the tube whilst doing so. Hammer it in as far as you can without the top going below the top cable tie.
4. Lastly, just tighten the cable ties around your stake. Make sure you have the tube the correct way round – usually, one cable tie will be closer to the end of the tube, and that’s the end you want to be on the ground. Also, be careful that your cable ties inside the tube haven’t wrapped around the tree itself before you tighten them.

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I’m starting this blog mostly to keep a log/diary of my adventures in permaculture, re-wilding and whatever other environmental areas I feel like rambling about along the way. I’m continually learning as I go along so, a disclaimer for future rambles – I reserve the right to be wrong now and then. My main project in this area at the moment is on a croft in the Isle of Lewis. It’s a slow but steady project on a croft which my parents’ and grandparents’ homes are built upon. Slow but steady, because I live in Aberdeen, so I only have a few weeks per year at most to do any work on the croft.

What is the project? I don’t have a solid definition of what I want the project to be, but loosely – I’d like to make the croft a more productive and resilient spot of land than what it currently is (a typical Lewis croft consisting of lots of grass and a dozen or so sheep). When I say productive, I mean in terms of providing maximum benefit to whoever lives on it and also giving nature a boost along the way. To me, this means a plot which is able to provide natural resources – food, wood, materials for composting, etc. Resilient, specifically meaning resilient to the climate change-induced swings in weather we’ve been having¹ – which are no doubt going to get worse.

So, with all the above in mind – I think it’s safe to call this a permaculture, sustainability and small-scale rewilding project.

Why am I doing this?

Permaculture, rewilding, and climate change are all topics I’ve been personally gaining interest in for over a decade now. These subjects have all been gaining traction over the last decade from what I’ve seen, and with good reason. There are multiple overlapping reasons to undertake something like this:-

• Improving food security
  • Instead of having only sheep – a single point of failure, you might now have potatoes and other root vegetables which can be stored year-round, along with seasonal vegetables, berries, and nuts from established trees to reduce dependence on supermarkets. It’s even more important to care about this sort of thing when you’re on an island which gets most of its food shipped over from the mainland.
• Carbon footprint reduction by
  • Growing locally instead of sourcing food from the other side of the planet, or even just reducing the transportation distance of food grown in the UK which we have to ship over here via ferry
  • Increasing biomass of the land via native trees, shrubs and the wildlife they support. Even if you burn any wood you grow from coppiced trees, they’re a renewable resource, unlike coal, oil, gas etc.
• Rewilding with native trees, which will
  • Support local biodiversity/species by returning the land to its natural state
  • Improve soil fertility over time via the breakdown of leaves/composting
  • Improve moisture retention in the soil
  • Provide shade and shelter to any sheep on the croft
  • Provide raw materials for various projects (willow for example is a fantastic material with many uses)
  • and many more reasons such as forests being shown to be more resilient to climate change than just a grassy area. I could go on and on…

Lots to expand on in there but essentially, at the moment, our croft is a single, not very complex or resilient system – it’s used for grazing sheep and nothing more. Raising sheep is fine, and the sheep have no doubt contributed to the soil quality over years of grazing – though sheep by themselves aren’t going to maximise the resilience and food production capacity of the land. If push comes to shove in the coming decades and we have years of global-scale drought which affects our food system – we’re in hot water if all we have on the land is a few dozen sheep. Going back to the establishment of the crofting system – a croft itself was intended to be sizeable enough to be able to provide a family with food for the year. Being able to survive completely off the land is absolutely possible, but it does take effort and isn’t something that can be achieved in a year or two. My plan is just to slowly increase the productivity of the land over time, whilst learning the best methods along the way.

Back to the sheep – they belong to my father, so I’m approaching this delicately, with salami tactics in mind. He’s not anti-environment, but he wouldn’t be OK with me planting a forest in our croft overnight. He seems fine with a few trees a year though, and before he knows it…. bam – native tree paradise! The good thing is sheep can happily coexist and be a major contributor in a permaculture system – benefiting from tree shelter, and more. I’ll also mention, it was my father who first introduced me to potato planting when I was small – it was a family affair when the spuds had to be planted on my grandfather’s croft every spring. It was all hands on deck when the tractor came by to plough that year’s potato patch. Everyone got given a bucket full of cut-in-half spuds and lined up behind the tractor as it churned up the soil, folding a row of soil over the spuds we shoved into the ground. That’s a story for another day, though!

More updates coming soon!

Footnotes

1. There have been an increasing amount of drought spells across the UK in the last decade – even affecting the rainy Scottish Highlands and Islands. You can probably still see it on the Google Maps satellite imagery but the grass in areas of our croft was yellow and dead that year – almost like it had been set on fire. ︎

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