RE: [CH] supporting chile plants
John Sphar (chilehead@pacbell.net)
Sun, 29 Jun 2008 11:13:55 -0700
Those ladders sound good. Don't think I ever saw one though. Here's my
strategy for supporting tomatoes and big chiles: A couple years ago I bought
a 100' roll of concrete reinforcing wire -- it's just a very thick guage of
chicken wire with large squares. I made about fifteen cages, by bending them
into a circle, cutting them and using the remaining length of wire to bend
around the other end. But I had to buy some beefy wire cutters. So I have
5-foot cages, straight all the way down. They're great for tomatoes,
especiallly indeterminate. The tapered cages I use for smaller plants.
Pest-wise where I have my garden, it's next to a huge oak tree and we have
squirrel problems all the time.
John S.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-chile-heads@globalgarden.com
[mailto:owner-chile-heads@globalgarden.com] On Behalf Of margaret lauterbach
Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2008 5:47 AM
To: chile-heads@globalgarden.com
Subject: [CH] supporting chile plants
Alex, I use those cheap 3-ring otherwise useless tomato "supports"
over all of my chile and eggplant plants. Thus I don't worry about my dogs'
roaming through the garden watching for mice and voles. Chile plants are
brittle, and only once has one of my dogs damaged chile plants in the
garden. Then, in hot pursuit, my strong wire fox terrier snapped a
heavily-fruited chocolate hab off at soil line, knocking over the cage as he
went. I picked off all of the fruit and sent them to Don, since they were
hotter than I can tolerate. Those three-ring cages should be very cheap at
end of season, or perhaps even now. Margaret L
Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2008 11:33:45 +0000
From: Alex Silbajoris <asilbajo@hotmail.com>
Subject: [CH] Trying peony hoops this year
Pods,
Over several years some of my plants, usually big bells and such, tend to
fall over in stormy weather when they are heavy with fruit. I have tried
staking them, which _sometimes_ works. This year I'm trying peony hoops for
support.
We have 30+ peonies here in the gardens, and as you know when they bloom and
the rain falls, the flowers go face-flat on the ground and that's it for
your blooming for the year. So we have metal hoops about 14" wide on four
legs. We put them over the plants and let them grow through, and once the
plants grow in the hoops are invisible but the blooms stay up in the rain.
Well the peonies are all done blooming and they've been deadheaded so they
don't need the hoops. So I've been putting hoops over my bells, salsa
peppers, marconi, jalapeno, etc. Right now the hoops are bigger than the
plants and it kind of looks like I'm trying to shield them from government
control signals. Or maybe an elaborate Faraday cage to distribute any
lightning hits.
And they are in fact calling for lightning, this has been a stormy start to
the summer. Today's newspaper has a front-page pic of interstate 70 under
water a few miles east of town.