Annual Harvest 2024

Bronwyn Lowe • July 28, 2024

Fabulous harvest! 3^rd, 6^th, 7^th and 14^th of July 2024

We had a fabulous turn out of people for every day of harvest this year, thank you all so much! With so many willing willow workers we completed the harvest in four days, including sorting out willow bundles to set aside for future Beginners Workshops, and transporting all the harvested willow to Yvonne and Steve’s disused shearing shed for drying and storage. A very big thank you to Yvonne and Steve for making this space available to us.

A game changer for harvest this year was using electric secateurs to cut the willow, so easy and fast! A few people brought along their own electric secateurs, and we bought a pair for our group just in time for harvest. Thank you to the weavers from Whiria ka aho ki Puketeraki, your generous koha enabled us to purchase these secateurs! We chose Lawnmaster 21V Lithium secateurs, same as the ones Jill has. They’re a good lightweight tool, easily handled, the charge lasted ALL day and a perfect speed and blade size for cutting our thousands of willow rods. A big thankyou to the supplier Steelfort for their excellent and fast customer service when we needed a damaged component replaced halfway through harvest.

We also made the bundling stage a whole lot easier this year by doing some pre-harvest prep work on ties and labels. A few of us have been steadily working away at cutting up old bicycle tyres for bundle ties and pre-writing hundreds of labels. Much better than trying to do these jobs in amongst the bustle of harvest, with cold hands and the wind blowing things around!

We’re keeping a log book of the willow harvested, and this year we tied up nearly 350 bundles of willow across 21 varieties. It was interesting to see from our records that we tended to get shorter rods this year than last year, maybe due to the dry autumn weather we’ve had. It also looks like the beds are reaching maturity, with a similar volume of willow bundled up as last year. Lots of good quality rods too, with hardly any seconds compared to the previous two years, except for the varieties Stone Rod and Americana. These are still producing rods that are very branched. Leicestershire Dicks is another variety that is proving hard to harvest and bundle due to the strong curve in the rods. The rods tend to grow horizontally out from the stool, then curve upwards, making it really awkward to get into the stool to cut!

Last spring we initiated an experiment to see if pruning stools in mid-spring would result in re-growth of shorter, slenderer rods in our larger varieties. We’ve code-named this strategy the “Chelsea Chop” after a method used on flower crops. We trialled this on a row of Stone Rod, and a row of Mr Green. At harvest we carefully kept the Chelsea Chop rods separate, then compared bundles from a normal row with Chelsea Chop bundles. The outcome? Looks like it doesn’t make much difference to Mr Green, but did reduce the number of very tall Stone Rod rods. We put normal and Chelsea Chop bundles side by side, and asked a few of our weavers if they could pick which was which. Everybody was able to tell the Chelsea Chop bundles, commenting that they looked more even and of better quality. So we’re thinking that we’ll run the Chelsea Chop trial again this year, but be more selective and prune back only the larger rods on each stool. Hopefully the unpruned rods will help limit the size of the re-growth rods, whilst growing a decent size themselves. Something we won’t know until Harvest 2025!

We also had a marquee this year, in case we needed a shelter from the weather. Thank you Sue and Chris for bringing along your marquee! Luckily we didn’t have rain during harvest days, but the marquee was still a good place to gather for lunch.

With harvest done, we can now start getting ready for our spring series of Beginners Workshops and group get-togethers. We’ll be publishing the dates soon, so keep an eye on the website. If you’re on our mailing list you’ll receive an email with those dates too.

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