wattle weaving

Wattle weave bed experiment

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Okay, so this project has been incredibly slow going!

I first started preparing the area at the beginning of July. That was just to prepare the bed in advance. It wasn’t until the middle of the month that I could finally get started on the wattle weaving.

For the vertical support posts on the long sides, I used the openings of the chimney block retaining wall to space them out. They’re not quite 2 1/2 feet apart. The bed itself is roughly 12 feet long. For the bottom wattles, I was using maple, which is not very flexible, even when freshly cut, green and newly stripped of its bark. So in that respect, the wider distance was better.

The problem is, I had I think only one straightish piece that was 12′ long. I had a few that were long enough that I could use two, but anything less than that, and there was just too much space between the verticals to do any weaving.

So that got set aside while I figured out where I could find long enough materials.

For the retaining wall side, I decided to experiment, and to completely the other direction. Each of the chimney blocks has three openings in the sides on the front and back. I spaced the verticals with four opening between them. In retrospect, I should have done it with three, but it’s too late to change that now!

I decided to add vertical supports in every opening, and try weaving with much shorter, thinner wattles.

I used the remaining pieces of maple and cut them slightly shorter than the verticals that are already in place.

Then I made a point at one end.

That mostly white cat on the left is Frank, aka: Old Blue Eyes.

Yes. He turned out to be a she, and she is pregnant. *sigh*

I used a scrap piece of board to hammer in each of the new verticals. I ran out of the maple, though, and use some willow for the last four. You can see those set in place in the second image of the slide show above. The willow I used is from what I harvested a couple of weeks ago, yet when I peeled them, they were still pretty green! Which is why I had to peel them. If I just stuck them into the ground, they would root themselves and start growing, and I don’t want to grow willow in my retaining wall blocks!

Once those were in place, it was time to harvest as many willow switches and maple suckers as I could find.

In the last picture, you can see the two piles I gathered. One is of willow switched, the other of maple suckers. I took advantage of needing these to clear out some growth that needed to be cut back completely, so I knew that some of them would not be useable for this. For the weaving, I need long, flexible, straight pieces. Unfortunately, even with the shorter, younger pieces I was harvesting, they tend to grow just a few feet before suddenly ending and splitting off into two.

Once the material was gathered, I grabbed my first piece of willow to start trimming the twigs and branches off when…

My pocket started to ring.

There’s only one place that calls my cell phone.

Yup. It was home care.

They didn’t have someone for my mother’s supper time med assist. They did for her bedtime assist. Just not supper. Normally, they are both done by the same person, so it looks like they found someone to cover for her for the end of day assist, but not the supper time one.

My mother was scheduled to get her med assist at 4:45pm.

I had just enough time to clean up, change and head out.

*sigh*

I did phone my mother in advance and left a message on her answering machine before I left. When I got to her place, however, she was sitting outside, enjoying the day, and was very surprised to see me!

I was early enough that we could sit outside together and chat for a while before heading in. Since I was there anyhow, once I got her meds set out, I helped her get her supper together, did some dishes, etc. I’m going to be back tomorrow morning to take her to the lab for blood work, so I didn’t stay for very long. I reminded her not to have breakfast tomorrow, as one of the tests requires fasting.

This makes three days in a row I have had to do med assists for my mother because there was no home care aid to do it.

While I way away, my daughter made supper and was feeding the outside cats for me again. I was very happy to grab some food, and then head back out again. I wanted to at least get those maple suckers woven in, as they will dry out and get brittle much faster than the willow.

Yes, Sir Robin is chewing on the tip of a maple!

I got about a dozen out of the maple I’d harvested and got started with the weaving.

At those length, I needed three to go the length of the bed.

I made it to two.

Even as thin and green as they were, with how close together the vertical pieces are, they just weren’t flexible enough. While trying to weave through, I broke a vertical. I managed to scrounge a long enough piece of older maple to replace it, but when I broke a second one, that was it. I found another piece of maple to replace that one – at this point, the remaining pieces were among those that were rejected for being too bent or whatever – and gave up using the maple suckers.

The willow was much faster to prepare. I didn’t even need to use pruning sheers.

For the first three passes, I wove the willow switches – it took three to complete one run – up higher. They didn’t want to bend around the verticals until I got to the skinniest tips, and would instead push them to one side or the other, if it was just one run of the willow switches. Once the first three runs were done, I used a scrap piece of board to hammer them down, little by little, to the base.

I kept that pattern up, but still had problems with the willow switches basically being stronger than the vertical supports. I ended up snapping one of the verticals after several passes. It didn’t break off completely, though. I was able to find a strong and straight piece of willow harvested last time and drive it into the space, alongside the vertical that snapped.

Some time later, another vertical snapped right off. This time, the piece of willow I found to add into the space had to be trimmed flat on one side to be able to fit alongside the remains of the broken vertical.

It took some doing, but I eventually figured out how to force the wattles to bend around the verticals as I went along. Unfortunately, that’s when the wattles started snapping, too!

In the end, I was able to get about a dozen runs woven through the verticals, sometimes having to get creative with shorter pieces to make up for not quite being able to reach the ends.

If you scroll through the slide show above, you’ll be able to see a picture I took from above the wattle weave, where some switches bent to the point of breaking, while others were just running straight through!

I don’t need to make the wattle weave on this side any taller. I had to stop at this point and head in, and will continue tomorrow, which is basically to tidy things up. At each end, the wattles will be trimmed evenly, and the shorter verticals will be trimmed to just above the wattles. The original, taller verticals will be left long. As they match the verticals on the other side, they will be left tall so that, should this bed ever need to be covered with netting or something, the taller verticals will be available to attach support hoops to.

Aside from the tidying up, this side of the new wattle weave bed is done. For all the pain in the butt it was, it looks much nicer than the other side. I’m not sure how those pieces that snapped during weaving will hold out, but on this side, it’s not going to be holding soil.

The ends, of course, can be woven in with any short pieces we’ve got; there are only three supports to weave around.

It’s the other long side that is going to be more of a challenge. I need to find more materials long enough to weave around those widely spaced vertical posts.

So, my conclusions on how this is going.

Obviously, on the inside, the posts are two far apart. On the retaining wall side, they’re too close together for the base thickness of wattles I was weaving, even though they are MUCH thinner than what I had for the other side. This is where it would be handy to have basket willow instead of the varieties we’ve got. Side note: if you noticed that some of the willow looked green, while others looked more yellow, that’s because they came from different trees that seem to be different varieties of willow.

With the closer spacing, the biggest advantage is that there are fewer gaps between the wattles. Which means they’ll hold soil in place better. What I have now on the other side has gaps large enough that I will have to line the inside with something to keep the soil in. With the L shaped bed, I had cardboard at the bottom of the bed that was wide enough to go partially up the sides. The rest of the height was lined with grass clippings. The soil in this bed has already been amended, so there’s no lining the bottom with cardboard again. I will probably just use cardboard along the inside.

I’m seriously considering removing the weaving I’ve done so far on the inside of the bed, and adding another vertical between each of the ones currently in place. I don’t know that I’d be able to reuse the maple wattles, though. If I had something long enough for them that could hold water, I would soak them for a day or two, to make them more flexible, but I’ve got nothing like that. It might be worth sacrificing the maple wattles to get a better and tighter weave. If I did do that, some of them would be used to make the additional vertical posts.

I’ve been eyeballing the trees in the spruce grove, and I might be able to harvest some poplar to use for weaving.

It’s a good thing I have time to figure it out. It won’t be used until it’s needed for next year’s garden, which might include getting winter sown this fall. As long as it gets done before the ground starts to freeze, that will be fine.

I really like the wattle weave beds, but gosh it’s hard to get enough materials for them. They use so much more than you’d think, and it’s surprisingly hard to find material that is the right combination of long, straight and flexible.

In the end, though, I think it’s worth it.

It is another reason for us to get basket willow, though! 😄

The Re-Farmer

Finally building the new wattle weave bed

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Spoiler alert.

It’s not finished, and won’t be for a while!

The first thing I did was harvest our unexpected maple coppice by the pump shack. It’s been a few years since I cut the suckers back from the old tree stump, so they were getting pretty big – big enough to start getting into the power line for the pump shack.

Time to take them down.

I cleared out all of it, including the smaller suckers. It’ll grow back, as maples tend to do, and the first ones should grow pretty straight, without having others to grow around.

The two stacks in the last picture of the slideshow above are the largest, longest and straightest ones. All the rest went onto the branch pile for future disposal.

The ones I was keeping got dragged into the inner yard, where I could work on them in the shade. I’ve been setting aside things in two piles there. One of longer, straighter poles and branches that can go into the chipper chute. The other is leaves, branches, etc. up to 1/2 inch, which can go into the shredder chute. Once I’ve got quite a bit built up, I’ll be bringing the wood chipper over to clean them all up.

The first thing to do was cut away all the little side branches and twigs.

The resulting pile looked so much smaller!

Since these are going to be in contact with the ground, my next job was to debark them.

Which took such a very long time.

It had to be done, though. Otherwise, the maples could start growing again. Willow and poplar – the other two materials we have for this – do the same thing. In the current wattle weave bed, I used stripped wood on the bottom layers, while the rest still had their bark. Amazingly, even without contact with soil, I spotted some fresh leaves growing!

I have to admit to feeling conflicted on this job. The job itself went well; stripping the bark on freshy cut wood went quite well and was almost meditative. I still felt like I was wasting time, when I could have been working on the bed so much faster, if I just left the bark on! I’m glad I took the time to do it, but gosh, it took forever.

I started stripping bark from the largest ones, leaving the shortest pieces with their bark on. By the time I was getting to the last few, the thinner ones were starting to dry up enough that I had to use my utility knife to strip the bark off, more and more.

I’ve got quite the pile of leaves, twigs and bark started for the shredder chute!

The largest of these were going to be the vertical supports. I measure the bed and worked out that I needed 12 for the long sides. I debated whether to just have one more for the ends but decided to have three smaller verticals at the ends, slightly offset from the long side’s posts. I decided to make the verticals a bit taller than the other bed, too, and cut them to 2’6″.

The posts then needed to have points made. For that, I went into the side of the garage where we store the lawn equipment. My late brother had set up a workshop in there, and there’s still an old vice on the counter. I was able to use that – wrapping the posts with an old cloth grocery bag to protect the wood from the vice – and the draw knife. That green wood cut so nicely!!

Ideally, I would then have treated the wood with oil, or charred the points, but I didn’t have oil for that sort of thing, and we’re under fire bans. So they went in as they were.

I’ve decided to add some wattle weave on the retaining wall blocks as well. With the spaced in the old chimney blocks, it was easy to evenly space out where the verticals would go, then hammer them into the soil. I then had to re-level the edge of the bed, since critters have been playing in the lose soil. I used one of the posts to measure roughly 2 feet from the retaining wall to set the corner posts, then set a line between them. I then used the line and the posts in the retaining wall blocks to set the remaining posts, before hamming all of them into the soil.

Then I dragged over the remaining maple pieces to start weaving.

The longest ones were used up in no time. Two were needed for each level.

The verticals are roughly 2 feet apart, like the other bed. In videos, etc. that I’ve seen about it, they tend to recommend 1 foot apart. When they’re that close together, it’s harder to bend the horizontals around the posts, and they are more likely to crack. However, with them being about 2 feet apart, the narrower ends get pretty loose before they stop. I’d do one from each end per level, which meant running out of length in the middle, making for loose ends and a bit of a mess. Some of that will be hidden once the soil it returned. Adding extra length per level would be more secure and less messy in the overlaps if the posts were just 1 foot apart, though. Which doesn’t help much if the wood ends up snapping, trying to bend them around the verticals that close together. Even using flexible green wood. In fact, I still ended up snaping one, trying to secure it, so the end wouldn’t be sticking out.

I’m glad I decided to do the ends as separate little walls. I was able to use those to help secure the ends of the long side pieces.

I ran out of the longs ones quickly, and the shorter ones were too short to be able to secure them between the verticals. They’d weave between 3 posts and just sit there, loosely.

Which is when I decided it was time to harvest some willow.

Once again, this was needed to get branches away from the power line to the house. I took only the largest ones for now; the smaller ones will need to be done, but I don’t have a use for them just yet.

After stripping off the leaves and shoots, there was a very small looking pile left behind! However, several of them were more than 12 feet long. I was able to weave those in from end to end, and just trim the tiny bit of excess with loppers.

But first, they got debarked.

The kittens LOVED playing with the ends while they were being debarked, and had a blast in the pile of leaves and bark.

Once I got as much as I could, woven in – leaving quite a few shorter pieces behind – it was time to call it a day.

I’m going to need a LOT more material to finish this.

The problem is finding lengths that are long, thin, flexible and straight.

The “straight” part is the hardest to find. Typically, the branches and suckers grow straight for maybe three feet, then branch off. Or there’s been some sort of damage that cause them to grow a new “top”.

For the retaining wall side, I could probably get away with adding more vertical posts, then use up all the skinnier, shorter pieces to weave onto there.

Tomorrow, if I’m up to it, I’m going to go into the edges of the spruce grove to start hunting down some of the poplar that has regrown. Hopefully, I’ll find some nice, long, straight pieces.

We have so many willow, maple and poplar suckers that I’d hoped to harvest for this, but the majority of it isn’t actually useable. I need to really hunt for what will work.

Which means this bed is going to take quite a while to finish. Which is fine. It’s not being used this year, and will be ready for next year. I also plan to leave the vertical supports tall, so that things like hoops or whatever can be added, if the bed every needs to be covered, to protect anything that gets planted there.

I am so tired and sore now, though, I might have to take tomorrow “off” and give my body a change to recover.

For now, I’m ready to take some pain killers and go to bed!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026? garden: prepping the next wattle weave bed

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With today’s heat, I chose a job that had me mostly in the shade.

It was still way too hot, which was bad enough on its own. Being eaten alive by mosquitoes while I worked was brutal! Gotta find our cans of bug spray!

The goal for today in this bed was simply to weed it and move the soil away from where the wattle weave wall will be.

The first couple of pictures in the slideshow above are the “before” views. Then I removed the sticks that were used to hold the logs used as walls in place. Most of them were broken, but a few looked salvageable.

I had intended to leave that bottom log in place, but I think I’ll leave it out. It’s not the complete length of the bed, for starters, and there were shorter logs and pieces of logs added to the ends. Plus, one end of the longest log is looking pretty rotten. I think it can still be used somewhere else. Just not here.

This bed has had a few years of amendments in it so, while it was somewhat compacted, it didn’t take much to use a garden fork and loosen it again. Which is good, because this is the first time I’ve put my left arm through this level of work since I injured it. I can use my right arm, if necessary, but it doesn’t hold out as well, and the motor control is not as good. It was more of an issue when using the garden fork. I never really thought about it before, but it turns out I use that mostly left handed. Once I was doing the actual weeding and using the little hand cultivator, though, it was less of an issue. Turns out I use that mostly with my right hand.

There weren’t actually a lot of weed in there. It hasn’t been watered, other than by rain, all year, so it was incredibly dry. What weeds did make it were easy to pull up.

It was the roots that were the main problem.

Some of the roots were from the ornamental crab apple trees. All along one section, I was pulling up smaller roots that were clearly attached to a much larger root running down the length of the bed, deeper down. From the direction others were coming from as I pulled them up, I think they were probably from the lilac bush. A few may have been from the rose bushes.

Wherever they came from, most of the debris in that wheelbarrow is tree or bush roots, not weeds!

After the weeding and loosening of soil was done, I used a hoe to pull the soil towards the retaining wall, then level out the ends and the edges, where the wattle weave will be done.

I’ve decided to make the bed shorter. At each and, I will find something I can lay down to use to step on to go into the garden from the other side of the retaining wall.

I’ve also decided I will use the retaining wall itself and add a short wattle weave wall along the middle of the bed, right on top of the blocks. I figure, if I’m going to be redoing this bed anyhow, I may as well make it a fair bit higher, so it’s easier on the back. It’s already only about 2 feet wide, which should be good for reach, but the lower the bed, the further the reach. As it has been, I could reach across, but it would get pretty painful, pretty fast. It will depend on how much material I can collect, but it would be really good if I could get this bed’s walls at least two feet high. Getting posts to weave around at that height will not be a problem, but the weaving takes a LOT of material.

I’ve been monitoring various willows and poplars and maples for potential material. For the vertical posts, I will be using maple again; the inadvertent coppice by the pump shack needs to be cleared away from the power line anyhow, and it looks like there are some nice, strong suckers suitable for the job.

With the first wattle weave bed, I kept running out of materials, so in there, I ended up using mostly poplar, but also some maple and willow. This time, I think I will have a decent amount of willow I can harvest, but I should have a fair amount of useable poplar, too. The problem is that a lot of the switches that I’d be harvesting aren’t straight all the way, but either branch off or completely split off, part way up. Since I plan to have closed ends on this, I’ll need quite a few pieces that are only about 2 feet long, so they would still be useable.

I plan to gather the materials as I need to use them. The vertical posts will be done, first, which I’m hoping to get done tomorrow, weather willing. For the weaving, I want cut and use the switches right away, so they are still green and flexible. The weaving will loosen up as they dry out and shrink, but at least they will be less likely to snap on me as I weave them around the vertical posts. Alternatively, I could harvest the switches and let them dry out completely, then soak them before use, but I don’t have anything long enough to soak them in. I’d need a water trough of some kind. Which we probably have, lying in the junk in the outer yard or beyond. Something we might plan for in the future, as I expect to make more wattle weave structures over time.

So the soil part of the job is done for now. Once the walls are built higher, more will need to be added, which will be a good time to amend with sulfur granules for next year. I might even have a chance to pick up a bale of peat to add to it as well. It’s going to take years of amending to get our soil less alkaline, never mind slightly acidic.

Since this garden is right up against the house, over time it will become our culinary garden, with herbs and greens and fast maturing vegetables that we can just pop out and harvest as we need. Herbs for tea and/or medicinals will also be included. There are a lot of herbs that can be used as all those things. I’d like to transplant the rhubarb to a better location, though. They are very handy where they are, but they’re at the foot of the crab apple trees, which keep them from getting adequate sun and rain. We’re not quite ready to get rid of the ornamental crab apples entirely, yet, and I don’t know that we’d be getting rid of both of them. It’s the one in the south west corner that is causing the most problems, but they do provide nice shade, look amazing when in bloom, and the grossbeaks love those tiny little apples.

All in good time.

For now, I’m just glad I got as much done as I did, in the heat!

The Re-Farmer

I made a video

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I put together images of the wattle woven raised bed and made a video out of it. This time, I borrowed my daughter’s microphone for the narration, and WOW was it better! I didn’t have to use background music to camouflage the background noises my headset microphone always made.

Something got glitchy when I saved it. I had to save it several times to get rid of some strange coloured stripes that showed up. They were only visible after I saved the file and checked it, never in the editing software. I uploaded the video, only to find the glitch had simply moved to the very beginning of the video. I had to re-save it and re-upload it, and I think this one worked.

Please let me know if you can view it all right!

The Re-Farmer

Wattle weave bed – it’s finally done! Next!

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I was going to post progress pictures, but I need to conserve storage space on WordPress until I go back and resize more old photos. I might do a start-to-finish photo video, instead. Until then, here it is! The L shaped wattle weave bed in the old kitchen garden is DONE!!

The insides of the woven walls were first lined with grass clippings. It turned out to be a very windy day, which made that job more challenging then it should have been!

Next, I used a hoe to make a trench down the middle, pushing the soil up against the grass clippings. The cardboard from the sun room I’d set aside for the burn barrel came in handy, as it was suitable for lining the bottom of the trench. With the bed being so narrow, the size of the boxes didn’t matter as much, since I had to cut them to fit, anyhow. The cardboard then got a soaking.

Next came a layer of corn stalks reserved from the garden clean up, which got a soaking. I raided the compost pile of half rotted kitchen scraps to put on top of the corn stalks, followed by a soaking. Then I raked some leaves off the grass nearby and added that on top, which then got a soaking. At this point, I climbed in and walked back and forth over it, to crush the organic materials. Whatever we decide to plant here next year, I don’t want the roots to be finding big gaps in the soil and drying out.

Finally, I headed out and uncovered the pile of garden soil we bought a couple of years ago. The cover kept the pile from washing away, but didn’t keep the light out, so the pile was covered with a matt of weeds!

I also realized the “tarp” I’d found to cover the pile had channels in it. We’d noticed them when we first dug it out, but only recently did I find the carport support peaces my brother said was in the hay loft. Some time after that, I’d dug out a tarp I thought we might be able to use to cover the hole in a shed roof, but when I unrolled it, I saw it was part of the carport. I figured it was a roof sheet or something, since it isn’t that big. Now I realize that this piece was part of it, too. So I dragged it off and lay it out on the lawn, with weights to keep it from blowing away. We’ll hose it down and see what we can do with it. The first sheet I’d found had a row of tears in it. This one does not.

I’ll have to find something else to cover the garden soil pile with.

It took 4 1/2 wheelbarrow loads of sifted soil (to get as many weed roots out as I could!) to cover the whole thing. In the process, I had to stuff more grass clippings higher up the wattles, so the soil wouldn’t fall through the gaps.

No, this time I did NOT give it a soaking! I didn’t want to compact the soil.

By this time, several hours had passed, so I took a break for a lunch the girls prepared for me, then it was back to work. There was a little bit of grass clippings left, so that got scattered over the soil – at least what the wind didn’t blow away while I was trying to spread it evenly! I then raked up and added a mulch of leaves. That did get a soaking, to keep the wind from blowing it away. Finally, I grabbed the wagon and filled it with as much wood chips as it would hold without spilling as I pulled it back. It turned out to be just barely enough to cover the entire bed with a thin layer.

Once that was done, the entire bed got a very thorough soaking. I wanted all the layers to be good and damp. I might even soak it a couple more times, before our highs start dropping below freezing. We hit a high of 18C/64F today (though with that wind, it didn’t feel like it!), but tomorrow our high is expected to be only 6C/43F, and that’s the warmest day we’ve got left. We are expected to have less than a week with highs above freezing. Which isn’t too bad, for November.

Anyhow. The more the bed gets moistened before things start to freeze, the better it will be for spring. With all the layers, the bed got filled to the top of the shortest walls. My intention was to have it a bit lower, and that will happen as the layers settle and the organic matter decomposes. I expect it to drop at least a couple of inches over time.

While working on this bed, I spent a lot of time going over and around the rectangular bed we’d planted beets in. Once the L shaped bed was done, I decided to work on that one, too. It is framed with logs, and I’d like to raise it a bit higher. This is how it looked, at the start.

The first year we had a bed in this space, it was a sort of triangle shape that was too wide at the end near the house. My daughter and I changed the shape of it, then grabbed some pieces of smaller dead spruces that had been cleaned up, to frame it on three sides and keep the soil in place. We planted carrots here last year, which the groundhogs decimated repeatedly. Amazingly, we still got a crop out of it. This year, we planted beets, which failed. Sort of. I’ll talk about that in a separate post!

There is a pink rosebush on the left, and this year – after pruning away more branches from the ornamental apple trees – it finally had substantial growth and huge numbers of flowers.

It’s amazing what a little sunlight will do!

This year, when we covered the rectangular bed, I had a board across the end by the rose bush to hold the mesh down, but otherwise, there’s nothing there. The ground slopes downwards from the house, so that end is lower than the end closer to the house.

That will be built up.

The first thing I did was dig a shallow trench across the bed near the rose bush. I still had some short logs I’d brought over for tiny log bed and border that didn’t get used (you can read about that here, here and here. Links will open in new tabs, so you don’t lose your place. 😊) I placed one of the shorter logs across, in the trench. Then I pounded in three stakes at each corner, to create upright supports. When I find logs long enough, they will be placed between the stakes. I want the long sides to go on top of the cross piece closer to the house, with a second cross piece to fit in between them, but have it the opposite way on the low side. One of the current side logs is a fair bit shorter than the other, but I think I find find something to fill the gap.

Though I plan to make the bed only one log higher, with the rose bush getting so big, the wall beside it is probably going to be three or four logs high to keep the branches out of the garden bed. I forgot to take a picture, but I’ve already added another log to that end. It’s slightly longer than the one in the photo, so that it is overlapping the longer side log. When I find a gap filling piece for the bottom, it will be tucked under that second log. The second log isn’t as thick as the bottom one, so I tied off the pair of uprights on either side of the ends, to secure them, and will do the same with each log that gets added. I made sure those pairs of upright supports where the tallest and strongest, since they’ll be holding the most logs.

And that was enough for today! I need to go hunting for long enough logs for those sides. If I can’t find any that are suitable, we might add more of those support stakes and use shorter logs instead. We have plenty of short ones that couldn’t be chipped, that were cut to roughly four foot lengths. The bed, however, is about nine feet long, so that might not work. We’ll see.

That done, I had time to work on emptying the rain barrel, which had enough water still in it to do the Korean Pine and Ash tree seedlings in the outer yard, as well as the haskaps and a currant bush in the south yards. So that’s now empty and ready for winter. Usually, I tuck it away in the old kitchen garden for the winter, but I think this time I’ll leave it where it is. It’ll get snow in it, which should be fine. I just don’t want to be chipping it out of the ice and snow again, to set it up to catch the snow melting off the roof in the spring.

While I was doing all this, I had the attention of so many yard cats! Even the ones that don’t like people, like to hang around while I work.

While I was putting things away for the night, I spotted this…

He was napping in the wheelbarrow at first, but I interrupted him while taking a picture. 😊

What a handsome boy! We have managed to pet him every now and then, but he isn’t a fan of attention.

I did get to give the bitty baby a cuddle, though! He came out to explore, and after several attempts, I was able to cat him. He put up quite a fight until I got him into snuggle position and started scritching his ears and he finally calmed down. I hung on to him for quite a while before putting him down, and he didn’t run away. Hopefully, he will become more accepting of cuddles as time goes by. We’ve had others that became less accepting of cuddles and attention over time. Ah, well. We do what we can!

The Re-Farmer

Old Kitchen Garden, wattle weaving progress

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Oh, I am so happy!!! It’s almost completely done!

I went and borrowed my husband’s phone to take a picture. It’s my old phone, but of course he’s set it up to how he wants it – which turns out to include fingerprint scan to unlock it. I really hate that function. I find they don’t scan fingerprints well, and the last thing I’d want is to get locked out of my own phone because the thing can’t recognize my fingerprint. It could well be because my hands are so rough, it messes up my fingerprints. Either way, it looks like I won’t be borrowing his phone when I got into the city after all. It’s changed so much, I had to get him to tell me where the camera icon was! He does love his funky themes and designs. 😁

Anyhow…

Here it is!

I had enough long poles that I could do the back without having to overlap any. The only problem came when it was time to do just the taller posts. It wasn’t too bad when I was weaving around seven of them, but when it came to just the three at the turn, it was more difficult. I had the shorter pieces for it, but three poles just isn’t really enough to hold the wattles in place, though for some of them, I could push the more flexible tips into the previous wattles to lock them down.

There was lots left over when the inside of the L shape was done, and I wanted to use them while they were still green and flexible, so I went ahead and did the outside. The first thing that needed to be done was to hoe the soil out of the path and back into the bed, while also clearing and leveling where I estimated the uprights would go. Once that was done, I measured two feet from that long pole right in the corner, marking three places; the left and right are lined up with the back walls, while the center one is in the middle.

Knowing I would be working with much thicker poles, I spaced the uprights further apart along the sides, compared to the previous ones. That left me with four extra prepared posts. After using the pencil point bar and a sledge hammer to make holes for the posts, then sledge hammering the posts in place, I could see I wouldn’t be able to use the uprights at the ends, so I added another post at each end, just inside the posts supporting the end wattles.

When it came time to weave the wattles in, I used the longest poles first, with the thickest parts at the ends, so that the more flexible tops would go around the curve. Some of the posts were long enough to actually bend all the way around the curve! When I put in the second side, I was able to wrap the ends around the wattle in the first side. I was able to do this for the first several layers before I found myself having to weave a shorter third pole around the curve. Unfortunately, a few of the poles just couldn’t go around the curve without breaking.

With the more flexible ends going around the curve, this meant the ends built up higher, faster. Which I’m okay with. For the last few pieces, they weren’t long enough to go around the curve at all.

I will need more material to build up the curve, but I also want to build that corner higher, too. So what I need to look for now is a lot of thinner and flexible, pieces. If I can find enough of them, I might be able to not only build up the corner and the curve, but wrap a nice edging along the top, all the way around.

Finding appropriate materials to do this was surprisingly difficult, but I’m really happy with how it’s turning out. By the time this is finished, though, we probably won’t be able to accumulate enough materials to do it again anytime soon, except perhaps for some very small beds.

Once the walls are done, we can add amendments and more soil to this bed to build it up, and it will be MUCH easier on the back to work in it.

The Re-Farmer

Old Kitchen Garden: Wattle weaving progress

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After finishing up my morning rounds, I did as much as I could with the wattle fence, using what materials we had been able to gather. There wasn’t much I could do with the longer sections. With the shorter part of the L shape, I was able to use a few single lengths, but even there I had to start combining them in pairs.

The girls had gathered some really nice, even pieces of maple suckers, though, and they were the perfect length for the wider end bit.

The red barked lengths are the maple the girls had gathered. When I used those up, I went to the pile of small willow branches I’d set aside and brought over the pieces that were close in size to the maple. Those are the greenish coloured branches. Last of all, I topped it with two thicker pieces of maple that I’d pruned from the nearby maples that are now clear of the branch piles. Those are are lot tighter, and will lock everything in place. I didn’t trim the top one to size yet, as I might need to move it out while the other section of wall is worked on. However, as it is now, that is as high as I intend to go for most of the bed.

It would be great if the whole thing could have been done like this! It looks so much prettier, with smaller gaps and more consistent sizes. The only down side is that such small pieces will also break down faster than the larger ones. It will likely still take a few years, but it’s something to be aware of.

I used more of the maple suckers I had gathered at this end, along with more willow that was left, and locked it down at the top with two thicker pieces of maple.

This corner looks a mess right now! It will be built up, end to end, until they are the same height as the walls at the ends. After that, it will be build up higher to match the heights of the debarked posts. By time I’m working on just the three tallest posts, I’ll be working with much shorter pieces, and should be able to tidy up the whole thing a lot more. Right now, it’s looking quite the mess!

That piece of 2×4 is my mallet.

At this point, I am out of useable materials. I think I will go hunting around the spruce grove for more material, before I start wandering father afield. The Red Osier Dogwood that we have would make excellent, flexible pieces, but that’s something I’m trying to encourage as undergrowth. I might still be able to harvest some, though. There might even be some young poplar I can harvest. Mostly, I just want to find enough material to finish this back wall. The remaining sections can wait until spring, if we have to. Once the back wall is done, the soil that has eroded into the paths can be hoed back into the bed and tidied up. I will likely use grass clippings that we still have all along the bottom of the wattle wall to keep the soil from falling into the gaps. Slowly, this bed will be built up to the height of the lowest sections of wattle, which will make growing in it MUCH easier on the back!

That’s about all I’ll be able to get done today, though. We’ve had another change in plans, with company coming tomorrow. We’re hoping to be able to have a bonfire with the remains of the big branch pile that got chipped, but it will depend on the weather. The forecasts keep changing. Just in case, we need to be prepared to move indoors, so we’re going to have to start moving things like our canning supplies back into storage, and all that other stuff that just sort of takes over every flat surface! We’ll need to be able to expand the dining table, too, which will take up twice the space.

We are terrible house keepers. 😂

But I’m really looking forward to seeing my BIL and his family, and really appreciate that they are willing to make the long drive out here, knowing that my husband can no longer go to their place. It’s going to be awesome!

The Re-Farmer

Well, it’s a start

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Since I wanted to keep an eye on the kitties anyway, I decided to see what I could do with the willow branches. After sorting the longest ones out, I started weaving.

This is all of the branches I have so far.

Minus one that was too bent to use. At least here. When we’re ready to weave the ends, we only need pieces less than 3 feet long, so I could probably salvage it.

As we get more branches to weave in, they’ll get pounded as low as we can, with each layer added keeping everything below in place. Right now, some of them just sort of pop back up a bit after they’ve been pushed down. Until it’s all tighter together, it won’t be holding much soil in place! One more layer along the short wall, and I think we can get away with no longer debarking the branches.

I really hope those maple posts that still have their bark won’t start growing.

I’m just itching to get back out there and cut more willow branches for this, but the weather out there really sucks.

I want to keep an eye on the bitty kitties, though, so maybe…

(glances out the window and tries to convince myself the wind isn’t that bad, and it’s not that cold out…)

The Re-Farmer