The end of the Willow Season

The willow season is well and truly over although we are still getting plenty of enquiries.  When the weather warms up and the days get longer, people start thinking about getting into their garden and planting – even though it might be too late for certain things.

Ideally, willow will be planted before the end of March, even earlier if it’s a particularly warm, dry spring.

This season we sold pretty much every last rod. 

Erosion control on the River Severn

There’s nothing I like better than a few days by the river – this time carrying out some erosion control works using willow spiling.  The site is near Maisemore, Gloucester and the erosion has been causing a section of the cycle path to fall into the river.  A few more metres and it would be the A417 that would be falling into the river. 

Sustrans contacted us to see if we could devise a low cost, low impact scheme and it seemed to me that using live willow was ideal as all along the lower reaches of the River Severn willow is the climax vegetation.  The river is full of silt; given a decent root mat from the willows, this silt will be deposited to help build up the bank.

Arundel site visit

I visited the Wildfowl & Wetland Trust at Arundel to look at the Wet Grassland project that we had worked on in the autumn of 2010 and it was looking fantastic!  The lapwings have taken to it in a big way with at least 6 nesting pairs and I enjoyed watching a brood of 4 young being shepherded around the scrape (one of the chicks spent a bit of time swimming) and the adults were busy chasing off anything that might be a threat – mostly Jackdaws.