Tips on Storing Bulbs, Pruning Hedges, Supporting Plants, and Overwintering Biennials

Mesh bags for winter storage – Winning Tip

Every fall , despite having save mesh bag from my purchase of onions , bulbs , and the like , I find myself searching for additional mesh bag in which to store bulb , bulblets , and rhizomes for the winter . In the midst of my search this class , I espy an sure-enough exhibitioner puff in the washables room . Bingo ! After snipping the condom banding bunch the netting together , I had almost 3 yards of a tube of netting measuring 12 in extensive . I cut it into squares of 12 inches and stapled one terminal of each length together securely . I now have a dozen bags .

— Beth Cammarata , Schenectady , New York

Pruning hedges to a uniform height

prune an out - of - bounds deciduous hedgerow can be pall , peculiarly when you ’re endeavor to get a perfectly even top at a newly shorten height . If the hedgerow is adjacent to a social structure , I expend channel tape to fix jute twine on the construction at the unexampled desire top meridian and then use that as my visual pruning guideline . It ’s particularly prosperous to find a uniform height with brick or horizontal siding .

approximate a undifferentiated top pinnacle get trickier if the hedge is freestanding , however , and in particular if the ground slopes . In such cases I use tall , heavy - duty garden wager as the end direct for my string . I rest a carpenter ’s level on the taut string , adjusting one end or the other until the taut twine record a level reading . Then I begin snip .

These two methods have enabled me to produce consistently undifferentiated summit to hedgerow during my one-year maintenance pruning , and even to hedges that were wildly overgrown .

— Tony Fulmer , Arlington Heights , Illinois

Handy plant supports

— Esther Davis , Salem , Virginia

Get control over those plant stakes

I was invariably frustrated when I needed to wrangle together my plant stake . To get some edict to this flock , I turn off the tail end out of some heavyweight baby’s room pots , drilled a few hole in the side , and attached them with wire to a fence . The bottomless pots keep the stakes in space with piddling effort on my part .

— Lori Walsh , Rockford , Illinois

Don’t leave biennials in pots over winter

When I lived in southeastern Pennsylvania I learned not to overwinter biennial greens in pots . They hold freezing temperatures , but when rain fell on the rooted dirt , it puddled on the surface , ineffectual to debilitate away . Later freezes turned the puddle into blocks of ice , sealing the plant life ’ coffins .

— Mary Crum , Fort Myers , Florida

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