In January 2024, I joined the SnoValley Tilth Experience Farming Project in Carnation, Washington as a brand new willow farmer. I rent my field, and hope that my childhood in a farming family and my adulthood as a gardener give me a solid background for success. Read on to share in the hope, challenges, and weeds involved (so many weeds!).

Why start a farm?

Let’s be honest, I did not set out to be a willow farmer, this farm is born from a basic supply and demand issue for basketry willow.

What I really want to do is weave. In the first year of my obsession with weaving, I learned to make baskets in many styles using the gifts of diverse plants (pine trees, day lilies, and native blackberry, to name a few). But I kept reading about willow, and eventually took some classes with experienced willow basketmakers. To make your own willow baskets, it turns out you actually need a decent amount of willow (shocker, I know!). And therein lies the problem: there just aren’t many people growing and selling finished willow for use in basketmaking in the United States. To have a supply for myself, and for the students that I hope to inspire in the future, you kinda have to grow your own.

So I did what any ambitious gardener would do. I bought a few starts (more about willow growing later), and planted them at home. However, my husband and I are not really prepared to give up our diverse and beautiful garden to plant willow en masse, so I knew the corner of the garden where I started about 25 willows was mostly an experiment. I was going to need more space.

Finding Land

I started talking to friends and neighbors… Surely someone is willing to donate a chunk of their unused yard to grow some willow. At the same time, I started talking to some of the farms in the Snohomish Valley. Lots of farmers are interested in adding willow because it actually has great properties as a plant (preventing runoff in wet areas and offering very early spring flowers for pollinators, to name a few). Eventually I heard about the Experience Farming Project (EFP), a program of the non-profit Sno-Valley Tilth organization. This project is geared toward getting city folks a supported, low-commitment way to try their hand in farming.

Because willow doesn’t need prime land (it likes sun, but is happy in low areas that are prone to flooding), I was able to secure a previously unused field at EFP at a cost I could afford. I suddenly had a quarter acre to play with!

Year One

Lots of things had to get started to create my willow farm… Step one, I needed to clear and till the field, as it was a fairly unruly tangle of canary reed grass and blackberry. I got help from EFP with this, as they have access to machinery and people kind enough to run it.

If you know anything about the more aggressive weeds like canary reed grass, Himalayan blackberry, or morning glory (bindweed), you know that tilling them is not going to kill them. They will spring back to life from buried pieces of roots come the growing season. I really wanted to avoid use of landscape cloth (there’s enough plastic in the world already), so I ordered a HUGE pile of mulch (forty yards!) to spread onto the cleared field. This would at least help deter some of the weakened weeds from coming back.

The pictures below show one of a few days of working to cover the field with mulch in preparation for planting. The photos make it look like I did it myself, but my husband did a LOT of labor to help me move and spread the mulch, using our Tacoma as a giant wheelbarrow. We had to laugh at being city folks doing things the hard way.