Last yr, as you could bear in mind, we had blended consequences with our combined wildflower mattress. After getting off to a slow start in May, the wildflower seed combo produced a riot of colorful blooms via manner of mid-June?However through mid-July, the ones tall, top-heavy stalks had all flopped over, turning our bounty of blossoms proper right into a scraggly, untidy mess. This 12 months, I modified into decided to discover a few way around this hassle if in any respect viable. I knew that the vegetation in this year's bed might now not be similar to very last year's, because the first yr's blooms were all annuals?Cornflowers, cosmos, poppies?And this twelve months the perennials should take over. But a number of the perennials inside the blend, together with coreopsis and Shasta daisies, get as high as 4 toes tall at whole boom, making them even taller than the cornflowers that collapsed so dramatically last one year, and I did not need to hazard a repeat of final 12 months's fainting in form.
I did a few searching spherical online and discovered several proposed methods of propping up tall plant life, but maximum of them seemed impractical for a combined bed like this one. This article on About Gardening, for instance, encouraged staking every flower in my opinion, tying the stem to a bamboo stake with cord looped all of the way as much as the bloom. This without a doubt might not be viable with such numerous flora in a unmarried mattress; I'd end up trampling the shorter blooms on every occasion I stepped in to stake the tall ones. Fine Gardening suggested that the flower-flopping trouble through choosing the proper spot on your flowerbed and making sure to feed and water the plants well, but that did not help me; I desired a repair for the flowers I had already planted, no longer a recommendation to begin over absolutely with new flora that is probably lots greater expensive to shop for and difficult to take care of. And commercial enterprise merchandise, like those cages and trellises from Gardener's Supply Company, would no longer artwork in a mixed mattress with tall and brief blooms all commingled collectively indiscriminately?And would be prohibitively expensive despite the fact that they did.
Eventually, I decided my best bet was a variant of the "cat's cradle" technique described in the Fine Gardening article. Instead of making a small grid of stakes and twine to support just one plant, I'd build a loose grid around the entire bed. If the tallest flowers in the bed were 4 feet high, I figured, I'd put a row of stakes in and run twine across at a height of 3 feet. That way, if they started to fall forward, they'd descend one foot, hit the twine barrier, and (ideally) stop. But then a snag occurred to me: what about the other flowers in the bed that were 3 feet or shorter? They might still be tall enough to flop over, but they wouldn't be tall enough to be stopped by a barrier at 3 feet. Should I run several rows of twine across the stakes at different heights, to catch the different types of flowers?
After a little consideration, I decided on three rows of twine at staggered heights. The back row would be at 3 feet, to catch the tallest blooms. The middle row would be at 2 feet, and the front row at 1 foot. This setup wouldn't completely stop the plants from falling over, but it would catch them before they hit the ground—so instead of just falling down and lying flat, they'd drape over the rows of twine in a cascade. The tallest blooms that stood furthest back would be caught at the 3-foot level; ones further forward, or short enough to slip under the 3-foot string, would be caught at 2 feet; and the shortest and frontmost blooms would be caught at 1 foot. Instead of a vertical flower arrangement, the whole display would be tilted forward on a diagonal.
Naturally, I had no way of knowing how well this would work in practice, since no one else seemed ever to have tried it before. But it was a lot better than doing nothing, and a quick trip to Home Depot confirmed that it wouldn't be that much more expensive: just $6 for a packet of 25 bamboo stakes (dyed green to make them blend in with the foliage, although personally I think their natural color would look better) and another $3 or so for a ball of twine. For 9 bucks, we figured it was at least worth a shot, especially since neither of us had any better ideas.
We were actually planning to construct the grid the weekend before last, but our spring snowstorm but the kibosh on that plan, so we did it yesterday—after the snow had melted away, but before any of the flowers in the bed had actually popped up. I could have tried to do it by myself during the week, but I'm glad I didn't, because it turned out to be a job that's a lot easier with two people. Brian did the brute-force part of the work, driving the stakes in by hand to a depth of about 1 foot, while I stood outside the bed and sighted along the rows of stakes to make sure each one was lining up with the others. We put the back row a couple of feet away from the house, aligned the front row with the front of the planting bed, and positioned the middle one roughly halfway in between.
Once the horizontal rows were done, Brian completed the grid by running three more rows of twine across the rows of stakes, from back to front. These crossways rows slope downward, from the 3-foot height of the top row at the back to the 1-foot level in the front—so the finished grid now sits at an angle tilted up toward the sky, much like a solar panel. Now all we need to do is wait for the flowers to grow on up through it, and we'll see whether my cockamamie idea actually worked.
