My Gift to You - The Swiss Army Knife Approach

It's quite possible you already have this gift but I'm hoping you won't mind receiving it twice. My gift this week is encouragement, resourcefulness, and tenacity. They are my gardening Swiss army knife and are often the most useful tools I have. I've used it successfully to help a mostly happy but slightly miserable Roguchi clematis.

Roguchi is an extremely easy clematis to grow. It will tolerate a bit of shade and likes to be pruned to the ground every spring.

Without something to climb on, it will just sprawl along the ground.

It grows between a massive Rose of Sharon and the metal railing to our basement.

Although it has been growing happily, the spot where I planted the Roguchi isn't perfect. It needed more support than the metal railing provided and had collapsed onto the patio, suffocating the plants growing nearby. An enormous Rose of Sharon had siphoned off all nearby water leaving the surrounding soil parched and constant thirst had left it stressed and subsceptible to mildew. While it was gorgeous in spring and fall, I often ended up cutting it back completely during the summer to rejuvenate it. Moving it simply wasn't an option. There was no where else to put it.

Encouragement: If the plant was happier than it was miserable, the problem could be resolved.

Resourcefulness: How could I solve this problem cheaply?

Tenacity: I refuse to let this plant die or look bad simply because I couldn't figure out a way to make it happier.

Dry soil: I wrapped a 10 foot soaker hose around its base to allow me to water it deeply once a week and marked the end of the hose with a bird hose guide I bought at Lowe's.

If I don't mark my soaker hoses with hose guides, I forget where the ends are.



Soaker hoses come with a little blue pressure moderator at the end. I always take it out and just use the spigot on the hose to determine how much pressure I want to use.

Floppy stems: I covered the railing with black bird netting and tied the netting to the railing using twine. Twist ties off a bag of bread work well, too. I also surrounded the stems with green plant supports to encourage the clematis to grow upright instead of sideways.

These green supports connect to form any shape you need. They are great for any plant that tends to be floppy.

As pathetic as this looks in the winter, it's invisible in the summer when it's covered with the clematis.

Mildew: I added homemade worm compost, which has strong anti-fungal properties, to the soil to help keep mildew at bay. I've used worm compost as a fungicide on mildewy monarda before and it worked wonders. I tried to find a scientific study documenting the anti-fungal properties of worm compost and couldn't. But since I've seen it work, I just use my own anecdotal data.