Wednesday, June 17, 2020
Last year, we observed the peonies becoming so heavy with blooms they fell over, despite their little 6' hoops-on-stakes support. This reduces the number of blooms that I can pick for flower arrangements!
June 12, 2019
One way to avoid this is to snip off the terminal bud (i.e., bloom at the end of the stem), and then the plant will put more energy into off shoot blooms. This is maintenance, and I suspect will still result in over-burdened stems, so I decided to upgrade our peony supports. My peonies are huge, so I voted 'no confidence' in typical peony supports (i.e., the metal ring with two stake supports) and bought 50' of 4' tall PVC-coated welded wire fencing. I cut the fence into 1x 4' piece (for my little guy who gets too much shade), 4x 6' pieces, and 1x 7' piece (for the beast). Cut it so that one end has little wire spikes. Wrapped each growing peony in the fence piece and secured the two ends together with the little spikes I cut (just bend them around the other side).
May 17, 2020
At first, it did not look particularly nice:
But once the peonies filled out, you could barely see the cages, at least not the taller ones.
June 13, 2020
The real solution here is likely that when the shrubs are done flowering and start to brown, I should divide my peonies. However, they're all strill thriving, so it's not 100% necessary. Something to think about for later on.
0 comments:
Post a Comment