101 Things to do with a pile of sticks

Make a toy raft
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll7vSVBhYAE

Handmade wooden slingshot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9oWGuKypuY

Stick bow and arrow
https://artsycraftsymom.com/stick-bow-and-arrow/

Tiny toy chairs
http://oneinchworld.com/blog/index.php/2011/08/twig-chair-tutorial/

Stick crown
https://www.mamamiss.com/blog/2014/10/09/julia-donaldson-stick-man-stick-crown/

Stick garland
https://www.funkyjunkinteriors.net/make-an-all-season-twig-pinecone-garland-for-free/

Stick mobile
https://happyhooligans.ca/pinecone-mobiles-for-kids-to-make/

Stick instruments
https://nurturestore.co.uk/how-to-make-a-percussion-stick-musical-instrument
https://homemadeheather.com/crafting-shaker-sticks/

Stick star
https://happyhooligans.ca/summer-twig-ornaments/

Stick and yarn God's eyes
https://nurturestore.co.uk/twig-weaving-autumn-craft

Stick Tic-Tac-Toe
https://www.firefliesandmudpies.com/nature-inspired-twig-tac-toe/

Pooh sticks game  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LX5023PmMU

We might be there!  If not we are very very close!  I love all these ideas, and here’s one more:  
make a cage for your pet cockroach.  A friend of mine grew up in Hawaii, and there were huge cockroaches there and he did that.

And another:
Make a lizard and snake catching stick.  Put a loop of fine fishing line or dental floss on the end of a stick.  A little like a fishing pole (do we already have fishing pole?).  To catch a lizard as he lies sunning himself, approach from tail direction, open the slip knot that hangs from the small end of your stick, and put the loop over the lizard’s head.  Gently lift up to close the loop.

Thekla McDaniels wrote:We might be there!  If not we are very very close!  I love all these ideas, and here’s one more:  
make a cage for your pet cockroach.  A friend of mine grew up in Hawaii, and there were huge cockroaches there and he did that.

And another:
Make a lizard and snake catching stick.  Put a loop of fine fishing line or dental floss on the end of a stick.  A little like a fishing pole (do we already have fishing pole?).  To catch a lizard as he lies sunning himself, approach from tail direction, open the slip knot that hangs from the small end of your stick, and put the loop over the lizard’s head.  Gently lift up to close the loop.

Thekla, great ideas! I got these added.  91 ideas listed to date.

If I accidently overlooked someone's idea, please forgive and post a reminder so I can add it to the list.

Sometimes a measuring tape is not practical for sticking in mud, boggy area or planter to see how deep the moisture is.  I use a stick to poke into the mud, water, or wet soil to obtain a water line, then I measure the water line on the stick with my measuring tape.  This helps me see how much water loss I've had in the pond during periods of drought.

Thank you

It’s fun to have the numbered list

Check out the new video excerpt by one of the boots - Reid - all about how to use a single stick to make, improve and repair things. Examples include a towel hanger, a candle holder latch, and a curtain rod. Fixing broken tool handles, such as a rake and a shovel, and other creative uses for sticks, such as securing a cord for a pulley system and fixing a foot pedal on a garbage can.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK6BuoX_0To

Fishing spear
Frog gigger
Depth reader for pond
Bend to make ribs/frame for a makeshift canoe. Can wrap the frame with plastic tarp and secure. Go fishing!
String or nail together to make a door for a playhouse or bushcraft shelter.

Another one: use to tidy tangled string rescued from beach when gathering seaweed. This one is probably overlarge to qualify as a stick, but the principal applies!

Similar to making biochar, you can make charcoal pencils in an overturned coffee can under coals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vocqJVZDugA

I also think your #33 is too compact. You need a different kind of stick pile for snakes than you do for bumblebees, for example. Snakes like the messy, casual, totally not trying to attract snakes to my garden style that looks like you just threw them there and forgot all about it. Suspicious beings. Bumblebees like arched cathedrals, and the piles must be shady and lush. And they like thorny sticks and berry canes. They are delicate souls and need protecting, but also beauty in their homes.

And edit oh my goodness kites!

I could spend hours talking about all the great uses for stick piles. Most have been mentioned here. Aside from woodstove heating, land reclamation mulching, and deadhedge, one of our favorite uses is making wikiups. They’re not only fun clubhouses for the kids, but they’re shelter for our free range animals.

After several years of making wikiups (and yes, our yard looks like some kind of ancient village), I came up with what should probably be called a wikiup fence, but just because it’s so fun to say, we officially call it a wikiwallup (as in wikiup wall, pronounced wiki-wallop). Basically, you start with a wikiup, which looks like a stick teepee (you can use string, rope, or wire at the top to hold it together if you want, but we’ve found it usually unnecessary), and then you add length to the wikiup, forming it into a fence that can stretch as long as you need. We’ve had them stretch hundreds of feet. We like to leave a gap at the base, making use of a wikiup’s natural advantage of being a shelter. Over distance, this actually provides an interesting sort of shelter belt for animals, birds, and capture-the-flag participants (I’m not even kidding. We play epic night games on our property and awikiwallup can get you from one end of the yard to the other undetected by crawling through the center—though more often we just sneak across from behind them).

Besides turning our (previously plowed by whoever lived here before us) sagebrush-steppe desert into an epic Lord-of-the-Rings-looking yard, it provides a nice privacy barrier and wind shelter, both of which were nonexistent before.

Let me know if you’d like to see photos and I’ll snap a few.

And how lasting are they? We’ll, it depends on how sturdy you make them from the start. The thrown together ones become s deadhedge in about two years, but the well built ones have lasted since the first build several years ago. We even have large arches for walking under, which can make decent trellises, too.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the songbirds. Overnight after putting up our first serious wikiwallup, we went from all-silent-except-for-crickets-and-roosters to the sound of deep forest aviary. Birds showed up in flocks, and they’ve returned regularly ever since.

Wikiups and wiki-wallups definitely sound picture worthy to me!

Can’t wait to see the photos Chas!

Here are a couple of articles about Wikiups:

This one is just about them: https://gundigest.com/more/how-to/make-wikiup-survival-shelter

This one covers several winter survival shelters, so the beginning is more snow focused, but if you scroll down, you'll get to the wikiup example. https://www.kuhl.com/borninthemountains/how-to-build-a-winter-survival-shelter

My ecosystem isn't likely to have deep snow, which I do know can be an excellent insulator even if that sounds weird to people who have never met snow. However, wet can kill because you can get hypothermia quickly from being wet, so being able to build something like a wikiup and covering it with anything that will shed rain is a good thing. Because of it's similarity to tipis, it can be used with a fire to actually warm up/dry out by.

Somehow I don't think a wikiwallup would keep my chickens in...

For fiber crafters, including net makers macramers, etc, sticks make good bobbins, for dispensing fiber & keeping it untangled.

Small sticks get used as fuel for my kelly kettle. Large sticks get used as "walking sticks that don't look like walking sticks". My sense of balance is not very good so if I'm walking on uneven ground, using a walking stick means I can look around me rather than spending all my time looking down for tree roots, rocks that like to jump out at people, long sticks that like to trip people up, etc.

It is not really creative, but add them to a wind break for protection from the dominant winds in winter. This also creates a good habitat for birds who nest on the ground as well as squirrels, mice, rabbits etc. and it traps snow. As it rots when the pile goes down, just add more or plant trees there.

If sticks are dry, the make good material for  building bird houses (as a hobby in Winter time), or , time permitting, decorate existing flower beds, or ugly looking containers.
We cut up metal barrels (non toxic material inside),  into 3 pieces, glued broken garden hose over the sharp edges,.
 

William Bronson wrote:
Not so welcome in urban and suburban settings.

Unless you have a real long backyard! My dead hedge was started with the cut up branches from a maple that fell over from my neighbors side of the woods out back. I left most of the tree and put a nest box up on one of the branches. All the small material I piled up along the south edge of the very back. I transplanted a bunch of wild rose from the woods onto the edge of the hedge. This year, they really took off. I have added more branches from my neighbors oak tree when she had it trimmed up. That created more protection for the rose vines. The deer still can eat some of them. I don't mind sharing.

Wow, nice work everyone! 3 more ideas until 101 is reached!

I wonder if there are any concrete ways we can "Study" or "Learn" from sticks. That's where my brain is at these days, but I'm not in my garden much...

make up stories about them?

Use them as dolls?

Make a hat?  Wrap string around one end of a bundle, about 3 inches from that end.

Spread the other end of the bundle into a cone.  Then wrap strings around each stick in order.  Twist the strings in between each pair of sticks as you move to the next one.

It takes a little tinkering to get the fit right.  Put a hat band around the inside to protect your head.

Once the framework is built, attach leaves or shells or ferns, depending on what or which or who you want to be or represent.

I can’t remember if any of these has already been listed.

But this is one of my all time favorite threads!

They used to use sticks as receipts before people could write. A knotch was cut in the stick to represent the items exchanged and them the stick was split along the length so that the notches appeared in both halves - thus the vendor and the purchaser both had a record. I think they were called 'tally sticks'.