Discover 3 essential green garden stake tricks to enhance safety, boost aesthetics, and control pests in your garden. Transform your garden with these terra cotta clay toppers!
Gardening with green stakes is essential for supporting tall plants, but they can pose safety hazards and detract from your garden’s beauty. But I’ve got a way to use them while preventing injuries and adding to your garden’s aesthetic at the same time.
In this post, discover three ingenious tips to enhance garden safety, boost aesthetics, and naturally control pests using green garden stakes.
Whether you’re a seasoned gardener or just starting, these practical tricks will help you maintain a safe, attractive, and healthy garden. So let’s dive into these must-know garden stake hacks and transform your green space!
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Top 3 Green Garden Stake Hacks for a Safer, Prettier Garden
Staking tall garden flowers is crucial for maintaining their health and appearance. Tall plants like sunflowers, zinnias, and dahlias can become top-heavy, causing them to flop over or break, especially during wind or rain.
Using green garden stakes is one method that provides sturdy support, helping these plants grow upright, and reducing the risk of damage. Green stakes blend seamlessly into the garden, maintaining a natural look while offering essential support. This not only protects the plants but also enhances the overall aesthetics and functionality of your garden.
By far, the MOST asked question here on the blog, on my YouTube Channel, and my socials like TikTok and Instagram is “But what are the little terra cotta clay toppers for?”
If you use green garden stakes as much as I do, they can look a little unsightly, am I right? But I’ve got a little trick that will help make them look so much cuter in the garden, keep you safer while working in the garden, AND keep pests away.
Wait until you see how those boring green garden stakes look and does more than just staking plants!
Green Garden Stake Tip #1: Prioritize Safety with Visible Toppers
Using plant support stakes is essential for supporting tall plants, but they can pose a safety risk, especially when at eye level. Since the garden stakes are green, there is potential to poke your eye out while working. It’s almost happened to me a few times, so don’t take the risk when using these in your gardens.
To prevent potential injuries, add visible toppers like small terra cotta pots to the ends of the stakes. These toppers make the stakes more noticeable, reducing the risk of accidents. Besides enhancing safety, the toppers add a charming touch to your garden, blending functionality with aesthetics. This simple yet effective tip ensures your gardening experience remains safe and enjoyable.
It’s a great safety tip and should be used when working with green garden stakes that do not have any bright coloring or safety device attached.
I’ve found this method very useful. I know it looks a little strange at first while the plants are still growing but they will fill in and you won’t really notice them as much.
Green Garden Stake Tip #2: Enhance Garden Aesthetics with Decorative Toppers
Adding toppers to your green garden stakes not only improves safety but also significantly enhances the visual appeal of your garden. Small terra cotta pots, colorful caps, or other decorative items can transform plain stakes into adorable garden features.
These toppers create visual interest and add a touch of cottage charm, making your garden more inviting and aesthetically pleasing. They create more visual interest, adds a little dimension, and provokes conversation. They add some cottage charm to the garden, don’t you agree?
By incorporating decorative toppers with plant support stakes, you can seamlessly blend functionality with beauty, ensuring your garden looks as good as it performs.
Green Garden Stake Tip #3: Implement Natural Pest Control with Earwig Hotels
Do you have earwig damage in your garden? They can wreak serious havoc on foliage so this is a great method for reducing that damage organically.
Green garden stakes can also be used for effective and eco-friendly pest control. By topping your stakes with small terra cotta pots filled with newspaper or straw, you create “earwig hotels.” These pots attract earwigs, which will seek shelter inside.
Regularly emptying these pots helps reduce earwig populations in your garden without using harmful chemicals. This method is a simple, natural way to control pests while maintaining an organic garden.
Did you know that a simple modification of this clay pot trick can also work to collect earwigs for disposal? Yes! Wait until you see how easy it is to protect your plants without chemicals using those cute litte clay terra cotta pot toppers and plant support stakes!
Essential Supplies Needed to Make an Earwig Hotel
- Green Garden Stakes
- 3″ or 4″ terra cotta pots
- Newspaper or straw
How to Make an Earwig Hotel: Step-By-Step Directions
- Use 3 or 4″ terra cotta pots.
- Turn the pot upside down and stuff it with straw or newspaper. (This mimics a plant environment for the earwig).
- Hang the pot upside down on each plant support stake.
- Earwigs will find the pots and hide, so empty it every day or so.
Final Thoughts On These Green Garden Stake Safety Tips and Pest Control Hack
Isn’t that a neat tip? It works so well too! Collect the earwigs then get rid of them.
Using green garden stakes is an effective way to support tall garden plants while maintaining a natural look. By implementing these tips, you can enhance garden safety, boost aesthetics, and naturally control pests.
Adding visible toppers like terra cotta pots not only prevents injuries but also adds charm to your garden. Creating earwig hotels offers an eco-friendly pest control solution. Embrace these strategies to create a safer, prettier, and healthier garden.
Have you ever tried this method of pest control before? Let me know what you think in the comments below.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please let me know in the comments below. I’d love to hear! And feel free to share this post with anyone you think would find it helpful too.
To drill down on more beginner gardening techniques and tips, please read these posts:
For more information about dealing with earwigs, please see Ohio State University Extension.
I’m so glad you dropped by today! Happy Gardening!
Thanks so much for following along!
Enjoy a beautiful day! xoxo
Want to Grow a Healthier Garden?
If you want to grow a garden that is beautiful, healthy, and full of plants and flowers, it starts with good healthy soil. It is so important to manage weeds and keep up on it throughout the growing season, because weeds zap nutrients away from garden plants and can quickly take over a bed before you know it.
But in addition to managing weeds, it is so important to improve the health of your garden soil both when you start a new garden, as well as over time. One of the best ways to improve the soil, is to make your own compost.
It’s less expensive than purchasing from the garden nursery, is very easy to do, and I’ve got a great recipe for it.
In addition to making homemade compost, gather all those leaves in fall and early spring to make leaf mold to improve the health of your garden soil too.
For most of my gardening career, I’ve worked with low-maintenance plants and flowers that did not need much from me in terms of time and energy.
They’ve been relatively pest and disease-free.
And haven’t required a lot of staking.
Over the last few years, I’ve paid more attention to the garden and adding THESE as stake supports for my peonies, dahlias, delphiniums, and bearded irises.
If you followed along with my seed starting journey last year, most of the flowers I grew required some sort of staking.
The flowers grew very tall and the blooms were quite heavy, so they needed a little extra help to grow upright.
When my new cut flower garden by the shed grew and bloomed at a rapid rate, I started staking my seedlings with green garden stakes like THESE.
Why I Started Using Green Garden Stakes in My Cottage Garden
Since I hadn’t worked with many of the flowers I started from seed before last year, I wasn’t sure how best to stake my plants.
Looking back, I probably should have used trellis netting like THIS in that garden but was way too late setting that up.
Which was a mistake on my part.
When I layed out that new garden with stepping stone paths, I created small rectangular pockets for the seedlings to grow.
It would have been perfect with the trellis netting.
I didn’t think the grow-through hoops that I love would work well for this space, so I opted to use 4-foot green garden stakes that I loosely tied twine around in a grid to keep my plants upright.
This method has worked well with some plants, and not so well with others.
I decided not to do it this way in my new cottage garden this year and wound up going with my grow through plant supports.
3 Green Garden Stake Tips You Need to Know!
That said, I still use green garden stakes with my tomatoes, sunflowers and other types of tall singular stalk-type plants, as well as to help with pest control.
Say what?
Yes!
Wait until you hear how useful green garden stakes are aside from staking plants!!!
