Green Up, Brown Down - 10 Tips on Keeping your Brugs from being Damaged in the Wind

 

Its very disheartening to go out and find one of your carefully nurtured Brugmansia lying on its side, the one branch that is heavily laden with unopened buds snapped of and rapidly wilting.  There are a number of things that you can do to prevent sudden winds from damaging your brugs (or other big plants), here are ten tips for those of us who grow Brugmansias in pots.

Fasten the tie to the stake firmly so it does not slip. Using soft material helps avoid damage to the stem, here we are using a foam covered wire around a stem of cv "Drogon's Fire".

Then loosely fasten the tie around the stem to allow for growth.  

Burying the pot is a cheap and easy solution, partially buried pots can be hidden behind plantings.  Pulling up buried pots at the end of a season can be difficult, especially if the roots have grown into the surronding soil.

Partially buried  pots can have the pot disguised by foreground plantings.  Here a cv "Jean Pasko" has the pot hidden by a planting of Tagetes marigolds.

We do this on any pot we place on a stump or a wall or a roof here at Leaning Oaks, just to make sure it is safely secured.

Inexpensive coat hangers from a big box hardware store make good hooks to go over the rims of plant pots.  We use four hook per pot with wire, which then is attached by a bolt to the tree stump the pot is sitting on.  If the pot is nestled inside shrubby grown covers like cottoneater or junipers, another hook can be use to tie down the pot to the branches of the ground cover.

Driving rebar stakes through the pot and into the ground stabilizes the pot and is invisible, they can be a challenge to remove in the fall however.

Tying to a railing or fence is a great way to keep your plant upright in the wind, one caution to consider is that it tends to allow earwings an easy access to your plant by crawling up the posts and might be best down with earwig resistant cultivars.