Piddlewick composting wattling bed
Wattling Bed in place
Wattling Bed almost done
Whatever is Wattling? Wattling is an old fashioned, and rather beautiful, way of making fencing our of thin sticks and posts.
How to: With good size stakes, pound them into the ground about a foot/30cm or so apart. You then weave, preferably green, thin-ish branches back and fort through the posts, with the next layer going the opposite way. Think basket weaving.
It creates a really strong wall, but is also stunning to look at as well, allows flow of air, but still screens.
For our raised wattling bed we re-used pruned branches from trees. We also added a left over liner to keep the compost within, though not strictly necessary.
Pumpjack & Piddlewick 
That looks like a labor of love to put that bed together. We have very few trees on our property, but perhaps I could use some shrubs.
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It wasn’t hard to do. Very simple in fact. Because of the pruning of trees, we had the branches.
Ideally you want them to be no more than 2 inches thick. 1″ thick or less is better. So yes, I would assume shrubs could work too. Length is great, but not required, just the longer the better for ease of construction.
Thicker branches we used as the posts that you then weave the branches through. The posts were about 4″ thick, and about 3 foot long as we wanted at least a foot in the ground and a reasonable high bed. Also our bed is sloped, so it worked really well as we could make one side higher than the other.
I’ve seen people do walls as well when growing hedges has not been viable.
We lined the inside of the wattling walls with some left over gardening material to help keep the weeds at bay. It seems to have worked really well, better than our solid board beds, as I rarely weed the bed, just pulling out the odd one, whilst around the bed I have to clear fairly regularly (but I am not so bothered about weeds that I can tromple underfoot.)
My Mum recommended recently to me her solution – soak (and she means soak) pages of old newspaper (must be black and white, no colour supplements) and lay them down on the bed, around around plants. Keep them soaked. After 2 weeks no weeds, and they stay away for a very long time.
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