The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Growing => Fruit => Topic started by: Fleecewife on March 22, 2019, 10:00:31 pm
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This morning, Farming Today was about trees. It has apparently been found that using a mulch around fruit trees made of shredded willow branches improves the general health and disease resistance of your fruit trees. Sounds simple and logical and for us, we have loads of willow so I shall give it a go :tree: :tree: :tree:
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Will try that too.
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Yep. Heard that during my cup of tea to start the day. Will be trying it too
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Willow is a fantastic plant! It kills bacteria.
If you have a tea spoon of young willow bark it works the same way a aspirin.
Be careful though not to put too big chinks of willow around your trees because they might start growing roots themselves!
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A couple of problems.
We don't have a shredder/chipper and the cheaper ones look very flimsy; any worthwhile-looking robust versions are in the region of >£500! To hire one, you risk importing tree viruses such as Ash Dieback and Canker. So not sure what to do there.
Then to reach the whole root system, the mulch would need to be applied right out to the drip-line. This would make it difficult to keep the grass mown, and it would be sure to come through the mulch.
As with many such super tips, maybe it is more easily applied on a commercial scale, or for someone with only a couple of fruit trees?
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Reality is that local hire would have local disease (if any) and if it's local your going to get it anyway unless resistant...
I have a £1.5K petrol chipper but even with that the thicker branches have to get shoved individually into the side slot and one has to be careful not to stall the thing with to much down the top hopper. With the benefit of hindsight I should have got a PTO jobbie at the start.
I did chip some 40 wheelbarrow-fulls this winter nontheless including a load of willow - just already been spread elsewhere....