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String or 'soft ties'
Jonathan62
Posts: 4
Just a general query from someone who's wife has decided she wants a lot of climbing roses in the garden. Is it best to use string or soft ties (which i noticed at a wyevale garden centre) to secure them to a trellis?
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Posts
Ordinary garden string/twine will rot and snap over time, I use it for annuals mostly. Long term, covered garden wire or even a cut up old pair of tights is best for permanent plant support.
I guess the soft ties are a type of coated wire ??? Never used them.
I do it loose Pansy.... leaving some growing room .
My method is to twist it tight to the trellis, then do a loose loop around the stem. Check and adjust it now and then.
I use the velcro tie which is on a roll from poundland (there's two rolls in a pack) for all my climbing plants, I just make sure I have it with the green/soft side facing the plant and the rough velcro edge facing outwards.
Soft jute twine only.
Most of my tying in is done with the green bio-degradeable jute garden twine. (I tend to find small balls of it I have taken out of pockets around the house and I now have an annual Christmas order for the stuff from my daughter.)
I don't like the idea of the wire cutting into the plant. The advantage of the jute is that the colour fades quite quickly. I find the jute more or less softens itself to suit what you are tying up.
My dad used to use that polyproplene twine which I would not touch with a barge pole.
'You must have some bread with it me duck!'
But soft rubbery wire does not bio degrade. I get at least good two seasons with jute twine.
'You must have some bread with it me duck!'
I am still tying in my C montanas regularly to cover and disguise a long run of ugly tree stumps behind my garden. Once it is out of my reach my garden twine bill will be a lot less. The Rambling Rector gets it as well but he is a rather bigger challenge.
'You must have some bread with it me duck!'
Thank you everyone for your replies, it looks like i will stick with the garden jute/twine/string for the time being then
Mostly I use string but on permanent planting say the stem of a standard rose other other woody stems I use "soft tie" tie in a figure of 8 this gives the plant stem space to expand if I neglect to check often enough.
To be perfectly honest, I use whichever comes to hand first - plastic coated wire or garden twine. With either, as long as you leave it loose around the plant and tight around the support it's unlikely to do much damage.
I have rolls of green hemp and waxed brown twine in old coffee tins with a hole in the plastic top for easy access to the length I need but I also, when I can find them, use flexible green plastic ties, rather like cable ties, for things like rambling or climbing roses as they are easy to adjust or remove and re-use as needed.