Tree Tying

I know, tying trees to a trellis doesn't sound like much fun, but hey, my life is slow so I don't have much to write about right now. Here is the tree tying post... Which naturally follows the tree planting post, and trellis making posts.

A couple years back we bought some curtains at a church bazaar. The curtains were made of cotton and were huge. We never ended up using them, and they have sat in the basement ever since. The curtains are about to become plant ties.

Meet the curtains...

The curtains were torn into 2" wide strips and the strips cut into foot long pieces (or so) to become plant ties.

My first step in tying the trees was to tie the top of the tree to the highest wire it reached, trying to align the centre stem with the X formed by the bamboo trellis. Since I will be removing the tops of the trees in the spring pruning, I didn't need to be gentle while doing this.

Next I tied the bottom of the trees to the lowest wire, below the trellis. here I did need to be gentle. In order to hold everything in place and be sure the main stem wasn't damaged, I made a round turn on the wire...

Then I twisted the 2 ends of the strip of cotton around each other to form a sort of stand-off to hold the tree away from the wire, but firmly in place. This also constricted the round turn onto the wire, preventing it from slipping side-to-side.

And finally a bunch of half hitches formed a sort of reef knot/granny knot smack down. The end result being a tree held firmly in place.

With the trunk in place, I could turn my attention to the branches where applicable, and tie them off to the bamboo to get them started growing where they belong.

After a couple hours, I had a bunch of white cloth tied to trees on the wires along the back yard. Yippee. Now I just monitor the situation until spring.

UPDATE: While th ecloth ties worked fine and did not damage the trees, they also were very difficult to remove when it was time to retie everything. I have now switched to using velcro straps to tie the trees back on the frame, and it seems to work much better!

Next Espalier post is here!!