The noted plantsman Michael Dodge (remember the yellow-fruited viburnum named for him?) is kicking off his second season of Vermont Willow Nursery, selling easy-to-root cuttings of Salix. There are 80-something species and varieties in his current availability list, with a footnote that there are more than 200 in his collection (though some in short supply)—in case the 80 didn’t satisfy. He keeps telling me this is his little retirement project, but it looks suspiciously more full-blown that that. Can a gardener every really control him or herself?

Dodge sells 8-to-10-inch dormant unrooted cuttings in bundles of five for $12.50 a bundle, shipped March into May (and again in fall for warmer zones). He also ships bundles of 6-foot cut rods for making “fedges” (fences crossed with hedges—get it?) and willow structures, and sells cut stems to florists. He reports that with Valentine’s Day approaching, the pink types of pussy willows are selling very well, like S. chaenomeloides ‘Mt. Aso’ (inset photo from the Vermont Willow Nursery website, left).

“There is nothing easier to propagate than most willows,” says Dodge. “This is because they contain a natural rooting hormone–in fact the first rooting hormones were developed from willows.”

So what’s his step-by-step–which those of us with willows can also use to make more to plant or share?

“I usually take cuttings about 10 inches long,” he says, “and a minimum of one-quarter inch thick (unless it is a slender variety), but they can be thicker than that–almost any thickness. I have rooted 14-foot-long cuttings in living willow structures!”

Stick your cuttings in the soil late winter, as soon as frost leaves the ground, to get the best results. Fall cuttings, taken as soon as the leaves drop, are about as successful, according to Dodge, who at his nursery covers the ground of the propagation bed with 6 mil black polyethylene to preserve moisture and block weeds. In a garden situation, cuttings can be stuck through any weed blocker with mulch over it, he says; Dodge uses a tire iron or a piece of half-inch rebar to poke the planting holes, making sure the thick plastic isn’t too tight against the stems, which could cause eventual girdling.

Plant the cuttings deep, he advises, so that just 1 to 2 inches remain above soil and plastic level. Watering may be needed if your soil tends to dry, but you don’t want to swamp the plants; the heavy plastic will usually do the moisture-mediating trick, and in his clay loam he says he doesn’t need to water them.

In the first year growth can reach an energetic 3 to 8 feet, depending on the variety, says Dodge (who notes that the Alpine types are harder to root than most others). A chart of which willows are best used for what usage is here (think living structures versus woven fencing and more) or just start at the Vermont Willow Nursery homepage.

(And P.S.–that’s Salix alba ‘Chermesina,’ the coral-bark willow, in the photo below with the red dogwood twigs of Cornus sericea ‘Cardinal’ from up on my hillside. My portrait of the giant pussy willow, Salix chaenomeloides, is here. My favorite Salix of all isn’t grow for its twigs or catkins but for its silvery-bue foliage. It’s the rosemary willow, Salix elaeagnos.)

I slice or chop onions and put them in freezer bags or—to avoid plastic—freezer jars. Freezing the amount you typically use for a recipe in one container rather than a giant portion is easier when it comes time to use the produce.

With the onion pieces and with whole, peeled cloves of garlic, I toss them lightly in a very small amount of olive oil first, hoping to reduce any freezer burn. By freezing about half my cloves each year I never buy garlic but have my own all 12 months. My popular post on how to grow and store a year of garlic is here.)

Freezing a portion of your harvest can be done at the time the crops are picked, of course—and they’ll be firmer and fresher then (though garlic can be harder to peel when it’s at its peak concentration of oils).  But if some of what you have on hand right now isn’t keeping well, hurry and try to rescue it by freezing—or making a big batch of stock or soup or something else.

One more thing: Be sure to check on other foodstuffs—potatoes, winter squash and such–and ornamental plants in the garage, basement, coldframe or elsewhere as well right about now. Substantially longer days (and in my location unseasonably warm weather) may mean some stored tropicals or not-quite-hardy trees and shrubs like my Japanese maples want a bit of water or other care to make it the rest of the way till freedom time.

Burroughs also wore a woodchuck coat (from which I infer that they were plentiful on his mountainside, and that he was a good shot). He wrote:

“In form and movement the woodchuck is not captivating. His body is heavy and flabby. Indeed, such a flaccid, fluid, pouchy carcass I have never before seen. It has absolutely no muscular tension or rigidity, but is as baggy and shaky as a skin filled with water.”

Not exactly complimentary; hope nobody speaks about me like that. Read Burroughs’s entire woodchuck passage from “Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers” (1875), or download the entire book from Project Gutenberg, which also has his essays on birds; his book “In the Catskills,” and various other selected writings free of charge. (The vintage print above is from the book.)

I’ve ranted about woodchucks before, and in my early years here (on Fourth of July, not Groundhog Day) I even tried to off one. There were fireworks, indeed, when I set the roots of a tree on fire in the process. True. The woodchuck? He watched the pyrotechnics in amusement, as I recall, then trotted off to have another meal on me.