Rooting willow cuttings in a jam jar

Willow is famously easy to root, to the point that people soak willow twigs in water and use the water to help other cuttings along. I wanted to see how easy, so in late August I cut eight pencil-thick lengths from the old tree by the brook, each about twenty centimetres long, and stood them in a jam jar on the kitchen windowsill.

Day five: small white bumps along the bottom third of most stems. Day ten: the first proper roots. Day twenty-one: six of the eight have roots longer than my thumb, one is doing nothing at all, and one went soft and smelled faintly of pond, so it went on the compost.

What I would do differently

Change the water every few days rather than whenever I remembered. The one that rotted was in the jar the longest without a change.

The six survivors are now in pots of gritty compost by the back door. If they make it through the winter, two of them are going along the bottom fence where the ground is always wet.