Most of the time I’m advocating for planting fruit trees and native edible berry producing shrubs, but of course I see the practical value in other plants like native flowers for the pollinators. Another useful, but non-edible type of plant are Willow Trees (of Weeping Willow fame), but there are many varieties of Willows, and most of them are not so sad.
Now, why are Willow trees useful? Well, they are extremely vigorous growers, and this can be used to your advantage in a few ways. First, they are super easy to propagate, so easy that you don’t need any rooting hormone – you can just take a cutting and stick it in the ground, and it will root. Second, you can extract a natural rooting hormone to propagate other plants just by soaking the willow cuttings in water. Third, you can coppice a Willow tree to make it form many shoots that can be used for basket weaving. Coppiced trees are often used to create large amounts of biomass for compost for fruit producing trees, or a biodigester for biogas production, or even just for firewood.
You can buy mature willow trees from a ton of different large company websites like fastgrowingtrees.com, gurneys.com, or burpees.com, but I decided to buy willow cutting rather than more mature trees since willows grow so fast anyway. I’m also not worried about the trees not taking root, because as I said before, all you need to do is stick the cutting in the ground and wait. Not too shabby. Cuttings are also way less expensive than mature trees, as it only costs $14 on vermontwillownursery.com for a bundle of 5 cuttings that are 1 foot long, but the cheapest willow on fastgrowingtrees.com is a Tri-color dappled willow that costs $40 in a 1 gallon pot. Plus, it’s way more expensive to ship a potted plant than to ship cuttings.
Also, I’m always a fan of buying from small nurseries, especially if they have a particular specialty. So, I ended up buying bundles of purpurea ‘Bleu’, ‘Americana’, and schwerinii cuttings mostly to be able to make baskets, but also for the biomass production (schwerinii can grow 6 to 12 feet in a season!!!) because I’m going to need a lot of compost to feed all of my fruit trees. I plan to plant the cuttings on the outside of the fence I’m building to create a hedge and help protect my garden from critters, though I think the thorny flying dragon cold hardy orange tree might be better in that regard. I also ordered a bunch of grape vines from Double A Vinyards to grow on the inside of the fence. Wish me luck!