Looking for Shaft Collar to Hold Garden Stakes
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- last monthlast modified: last monthwestes Zone 9b California SF Bay thanked daninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)
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BAD Bugholes & thin garden stakes
Comments (18)You certainly can use two mixes wet on wet. Put a nice sloppy fine sand mix to pick up the detail. Wait a few minutes and pour in your rocky premix concrete for strength underneath. If your sandmix gets a little dry just smear on some PVA white glue before pouring in your second mix. Just remember that most premix concretes should be 2" thick minimum because of the agregate size. If you want to make them a little thinner use regular Portlands, sand and BIRDSEYE GRAVEL. Birdseye is finer gravel about 1/4 inch in size used for road repair and you can get it cheap at the same place you get the sand. Birdseye is perfect for stones thinner than two inches. A bag of Portlands, a hundred pounds of birdseye gravel and a hundred pounds of sharp sand is going to make your stones cheaper and stronger than any premix. The reason I suggested a topping mix is they are designed to be runny without a lot of water. They use admixes to accomplish this so the product is very hard and strong. Any topping mix designed to repair concrete walkways or steps is going to hold up very well in a stepping stone and should pick up the pattern detail perfectly. Most places that sell ready mix concrete will sell you all the sand you can shovel for a very modest cost. Ask any brick layer when he goes to get his good sharp sand. Any concrete topping mix should also make very strong paddles. However the grout that was reccommended might be cheaper....See More"Green Collar Crime"
Comments (36)If your zone 9 is somewhere in California, please do not bring home cuttings of wild, or any other roses. By smuggling uninspected material of any kind into the State, you run too great a risk of also smuggling in RRD/RRV or some other pathogen or pest we may not already have here. Agriculture is a huge industry here due to the climate. With the drought, existing pests and diseases, and escalating land prices, there are already great pressures on agriculture, including roses. It is very easy to accidentally bring in Japanese Beetles, RRD/RRV, or some other issue we don't already deal with. Some of the worst diseases and pests are here because someone smuggled in material without playing by the rules. Citrus Greening and the Asian Citrus Psyllid which spreads it appear to have been smuggled into the state. So, please, don't smuggle in "wild plants" from anywhere. Play by the rules, no matter where you live. Kim...See MoreRose collars, winter protection
Comments (23)Hi folks I missed this thread the first time around before I started posting, so I thought I'd chime in now. I'm the friend Mindy mentioned that puts the chopped off complete bags of leaves next to but not around the roses, and as a system it works for me and my 700 or so roses. I thought I'd add my 2 cents to Seil's concerns about the bag method, since they're all important issues for rose gardeners. - First, I don't find that the bag disintegrates at all - in fact, I have some extra slices of bags from last year in unused parts of my garden that are perfectly intact, at least on the sides that hold the leaves (not on the bottom, which does sometimes start to disintegrate if moist). - Secondly, everyone is totally right to be wary of protecting roses with any method too early in the season before the ground is fully frozen, because of rodents nesting in the material as well as risking the roses not getting or staying dormant. I wait till the ground is fully frozen - usually around Christmas or a few weeks before that - so the roots stay cold, not warm. The danger in Nebraska and many other highly changeable climates is that the roses here experience relatively long cycles of warming periods in January and February that might disrupt the dormancy, and the point of the protection (at least in my yard) is to temper only the extremes. The bags keep the worst of the winter winds away and encourage the frozen ground to stay relatively frozen throughout January and February, but I uncover when the roses start to leaf out no matter the calendar (like this year was 3 weeks early at least) to keep them from cankering in the now thawed ground. - Third, I find that the bags are really helpful for me, not only in creating air circulation around the base of the plant itself, but also in keeping the main moisture away from the base of the plant. The paper bags are tough enough to keep even soggy maple and linden leaves contained in a solid frozen block of essentially ice that's a few inches away from the actual stem of any roses. I'd rather not collect those kinds of leaves, but when I poach 200 bags or more from neighbors, I can't be too picky (just no dog poop, please!!) I tend to fill in with my own oak leaves that I know will have a lot of air space and never get soggy, but that's only me. I consider these bags like little "down coats" for the roses, that create pockets of protected air around the roses that protect them like your coat protects you, even if it's not at all contacting your skin. The extra (still) air is a layer of protection too, in its way. RpR has my admiration, as that method sounds waaaay harder than what I do - to create wire cages and protect each rose, though I do like the idea of making one giant breathable cover for the whole bed of roses. I saw Karl (RoseNut) years ago post something of the sort where he puts styrofoam or foamboard (or something light) edges around the bed and builds their own little winter garage, but anything that requires tools other than pruners or a watering can strikes me as "work" and roses are "fun". One of the best things I like about my method is that uncovering the roses doubles as mulching the roses for the spring. Yes, I have to haul off about half of the leaves (which I do indeed lift off as a unit of sliced bag and dump in my wheelbarrow) but I have two neighbors who welcome them as free mulch for their vegetable beds in the spring. For me, if I bring the spring alfalfa and once-yearly fertilizer dose with me as I uncover the roses, every spring chore except for pruning gets done in one fell swoop. I like being a lazy gardener when I can be. And yes, I consider this covering lazy. Once I've collected all the leaf bags (most of the month of November, a slow gardening month anyway), I can cover all 700 in 3 relatively leisurely weekend days. My all-time record speed was two years ago when we literally had 24 hours between 70 degree temperatures and 2 feet of snow that lasted all winter, and I covered all the roses in a day and a half, but I don't recommend that. Frankly, if I had consistent snow cover I don't think I'd cover the roses at all, since nature would insulate them in the easiest way possible and uncover them when the climate was right without any work on my part, but we rarely if ever keep consistent snow cover even long enough to cross-country ski on it. Some time this fall, I'll post pictures if anyone is interested in trying this method, but everyone has their own techniques, and like our own planting formulas some of these are undoubtedly our personal (sometimes mythological I'm sure in my case) beliefs about what roses need, but they're at least derived from what works for us individually. For now, the Grinch poem elsewhere on the roses forum has my technique more or less laid out (if you can read between the rhyming lines). Just my two cents from my experience! Cynthia...See MoreTo stake or not to stake American Hollies
Comments (13)Deciding when a tree can blow over if not staked requires some experience and judgment. My new house in Winchester is on 8 acres and I have planted about 125 trees. Not as many as it sounds like--there are lots of big open areas left. Anyway, I have staked only about 15 of these trees and have the one mistake I reported earlier. One test is to take the trunk in your hand after planting and give it a really good tug to simulate a wind stronger than you would expect. If the earth in the root ball does not bulge up and the trunk does not move so far to one side that it leaves a kind of open gap on the other side, there is no reason to stake. A very flexible trunk reduces the need to stake. I planted three 5 foot green giants last spring and the trunks were so flexible that most of the pressure was taken from the base of the trunk as it entered the root ball. When the strong winds came they bent way over, but there was no movement in the root ball or losseness at the base of the trunk. It would have been silly to waste time staking these guys. A lot of my trees have been two and three feet tall and did not need to be staked. I think I staked just about 4 of these small trees because there was no root ball to speak of and they were essentially bare root and would have worked themselves loose in the wind. As for the topic of this post here, the holly trees--my guess is that the trunks are fairly stiff, and the tops with their evergreen leaves will provide a kind of "sail" that will catch a lot of wind. And the trees are expensive and hard to find. I wouldn't dream of not staking these trees unless the root ball is really, really firm, and they are planted so the rootball is really anchored in the soil. Of course if they are planted in a place protected from the wind the risk is much less. My place here is like a wind tunnel. From the end of October to the middle of May there is a really high probability of wind gusts in excess of 60 mph, and I want to plan for at least 75. (I may seem to be exaggerating, but in the last two years three houses within a mile of here have had their siding stripped off by these winter winds--but that's another story.) And then of course there are summer thunderstorms and straight-line microbursts filled with rain that can put a tremendous force on the top of a little newly planted tree. Yeah, maybe those storms don't hit every year, but as soon as you have $3,000 invested in some really special trees you can bet one will hit. So I make my decisions to stake with that in mind. With these hollies, I would keep them staked until about August 20 of next year after the worst of the thunderstorm/microburst season is over and the roots have had a chance to grow into the soil surrounding the original root ball. --Spruce...See MoreRelated Professionals
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- last monthwestes Zone 9b California SF Bay thanked theforgottenone1013 (SE MI zone 5b/6a)
- last month
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tapla (mid-Michigan, USDA z5b-6a)