How to Stake a Plant

I'm Bill Elzey with Showplace Lawns. Let's talk about staking a plant. In this particular case or any time you want to stake a plant you will need a good wood, there are some good plastic ones, a good thing for a stake. In this particular one this is an old broom handle, works just fine. You will need a hammer to drive it into the ground and you'll need a nice piece of soft rope or string or even some of those little ties that you can get for plastic bags will work in certain cases. Now you want to be careful that you don't have anything really rough on the plant. Once you get the stake in the ground like we have here, bring the string around, pull the plant up, and then just tie it off to your stake. You want it tight but you don't want it too tight because you don't want to harm the plant. Some variation like that which is now holding this up. Putting the stake in the ground is very simple. You want to be careful that you don't drive it into or through the root of the plant so you need to be very careful with that but you do want to put it close to the center of the plant so you have something that will hold up and then just basically put your stake in the ground like that, get your string, be careful on your placement, and that should do it. Again you don't want it to be real straight and real tight. You want to keep some layering like that with your plant but that should hold it up and it is not tight enough now to cut into your plant or do any damage there.