Heaving lessons for those in mild climates
totototo@telus.net (Thu, 20 Mar 2008 10:02:54 PDT)
On 18 Mar 08, at 19:46, P. C. Andrews wrote:
Is there something comparable in mild climates? Do mild
climates have heaving too?
No heaving in Zone 11, but at least heaving lays your labels gently
near their origin. Hurricanes, over-enthusiastic raking, and the
neighbor's terriers (& chickens) mean that I have resorted to burying
the labels with the bulbs and dig them up if I want to refresh my
memory (which is increasingly often). My GPS doesn't give fine enough
resolution and the grid system I set up years ago was just too much
trouble (the dogs got most of the stakes). Still looking for
ideas...........
The system I've used for years (and have probably described before on
this mailing list) involves using Dymo embossed stick-on labels
affixed to lengths of aluminum strip.
I use 12" lengths of 1/2" × 1/8" aluminum. The backing of the
embossed label is peeled off and the label applied to an area
previously coated with contact cement.
Advantages:
1. Even when the label fades, the embossing remains readable.
2. Too heavy for birds, raccoons, and rodents to mess around with.
3. The contact cement means the labels *never* peel off. In the
twenty or so years I've used this system, the embossed label has come
loose in less than half a dozen cases.
4. The aluminum can be re-used by paring off the old label with a
sharp edge and putting on a new one.
5. If you bang these into the ground so only an inch or two shows,
they're immovable by any force of nature barring major erosion by
flooding.
Disadvantages:
1. The garden looks ugly as sin with strips of aluminum sticking up
out of the beds all over the place.
2. If you use, as I do, a bolt cutter to cut the aluminum strips to
length, you end up with sharp corners that can (and do) cut when you
step on them with bare feet.
For some time I have been contemplating removing all the garden
labels. My garden is, after all, a private pleasure garden, not a
botanical garden nor a plant conservation garden, and if I lose track
of which bulb is where, what difference does it make to the way the
garden looks?
The bulbs can be their own labels, iow.
--
Rodger Whitlock
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Maritime Zone 8, a cool Mediterranean climate
on beautiful Vancouver Island