Peony Seeds from Luoyang China with Garden Stakes
It took me a lot longer to figure out how to label these 2018 Tree Peony Seeds from Luoyang, China than it did to actually plant them. I did get them planted last week though, before our big snow, 2018 7 Inches of Snow on Southern Peony Gardens! (just in time, I guess!) I don't know what if anything they will do, but we shall see in the spring, if not spring 2019, then spring 2020, I suppose. I ended up laminating the photos of the seeds and attaching those to some copper garden stakes I had on hand. Since they didn't have an English name printed on them, I couldn't easily print a Brother label for them. Just in case they don't do much, I didn't want to have my husband go to the trouble of trying to figure out the translation for each of them.
Chinese Tree Peony Photo Garden Stakes
So what I did to create these garden stakes was first write a number on every paper and every plastic bag (1-20) so I could keep straight which picture went with which bag of seeds. Then I scanned in all of these tree peony photos in case I need to reference them later. Then I laminated each photo with some UV resistant laminating material. Then I used gorilla tape to affix each laminated photo to the copper garden stake. I'm kind of curious to see how these hold up. Even if these peony seeds don't do much, it will be an interesting experiment to see if the photos fade or not, whether the gorilla tape withstands the elements well, and how these "photo" garden stakes hold up outside.
Copper Tree Peony Garden Stakes
fwiw - we use copper labels on our farm and have found they do hold up well in the elements here (3-5 feet of snow quite typical etc)
ReplyDeletewe've run into 2 issues:
1) copper is soft so sometimes the face plate will get removed from the stake. this happens very rarely though
2) I think I've mentioned to you that our pigs sometimes break into our peony fields? something about the shiny copper intrigues them and they chew on the tags!!
Hopefully you will only encounter issue #1! =)
Lyndaker Farms,
DeleteI must say I got a really good laugh out of #2!!! Thank you for your comments. I have found copper garden stakes will hold up, but there are definitely better (more expensive) options out there. The copper gardens stakes typically oxidize and turn dark brown and or green. Usually the faceplate material is much thinner too. I never use these copper garden stakes for my peony cultivars, but I do usually use them for my peony seedlings (and most all of my other garden plants that are not peonies). These copper garden stakes are definitely not beautiful and shiny for very long, but they will usually last.
My favorite garden stakes are the Kincaid Stainless Steel garden stakes. These shiny silver stakes always look brand new (no matter how many years old they are). The only reason these stakes get messed up is if they have a run in with my lawn mower or the bottom side of someone's shoe. This is always user error, though, and Kincaid sells replacement faceplates if you need them.
Hopefully your pigs will find something better to eat than garden tags!
Adriana