Product Review: Ultimate Plant Cage, Ultimate Plant Clips, Ultimate Plant Stakes

DISCLOSURE: I was provided with the following products for review:
• Ultimate Plant Cage
• Ultimate Plant Clips
• Ultimate Plant Stakes
No other compensation was given. My understanding was that I was to provide a review of the stakes whether I liked them or not, but that I didn't necessarily have to acknowledge the clips and cage, which were sent along with the stakes. Though I'm acknowledging them anyway, because why the hell not.

The first thing to note is that the company that sells these products, Global Garden Friends, was unusually pleasant to communicate with, both when we were first discussing whether or not I would review their products, and later on when I had questions about the products while trying to draft the review. And that even remained the case when I delayed the review over and over for various reasons. This is probably not the sort of thing that's going to matter to you much as a consumer, but it was so novel to have a company treat me somewhat like a person that it seemed worth bringing up.

So here are my experiences with the three products I tried:


Ultimate Plant Cage

The cage didn't work particularly well for me, for reasons that I think are not the fault of the product. I only had one plant that I needed caged, a Monstera deliciosa, and it was already well-established, large, heavy, and contorted. (The reason I needed a cage was because it had gotten so large that it was no longer possible to do much of anything with it, including moving it to the tub to water, so sprawly and awkward it had become.) This is how it's supposed to work:


Which seems nice and straightforward, but I couldn't even get the base assembled around the bottom of the plant, because of the tangle of stems and aerial roots and so forth. The pot was not much larger than the ring in the first place, so I was trying to gather up the stems in the middle and build the ring around them, but when I finished building the ring and released the plant to move on to the next stage of the assembly process, the weight of the stems pulled the ring apart. This happened over and over until I gave up.

So I don't feel like I can fairly evaluate the cage. This isn't the cage's fault; it's the plant's fault, for being so heavy, and having already grown without a support for so long. I will likely have to restart the Monstera in question from cuttings soon, so if/when this happens, I'll start it in the cage and see how much better that works. So there may be a follow-up review at some point in the next year.


Ultimate Plant Clips

I had some troubles with these too, some of them the fault of the product and some not. There is an upper limit to how large of a stem they'll hold. If you attempt something bigger in diameter than that,¹ the clips won't close around the stem. Or they'll close but then pop back open after a couple seconds. Aside from the size limitations, they work fine, and as the website notes, they can be attached one-handed, while you use your other hand to hold things in the right position or whatever.

I still wouldn't buy these myself, mostly because of the cost. You can get 20 clips for $5, which doesn't sound bad, but I can get a whole skein of acrylic yarn for $3, which is enough to tie stems to objects all day long and still have enough yarn left over to knit six pairs of baby booties. There's nothing wrong with the clips, and if you like the look of them better than yarn then hey, go for it, but the product is solving problems that I don't actually have.


Ultimate Plant Stakes

On the other hand: stakes. I have problems with plants leaning. Sometimes that's because plants aren't growing that well, leading to weak stems, phototropism, and the like. Sometimes it's because they're growing too well, and a small, weak base is trying to support a large, heavy top. Some plants just want to lean over after they grow for a while, even if everything's perfect. So stakes are a thing that I sometimes need and use, and I've tried a lot of different things.

With that said, the bar is set pretty low on what an object needs to do in order to function as a plant stake. Mostly it just needs to be capable of verticality and strong enough not to bend under the weight of the plant. So how impressive is it, really, if a product can stand upright without bending? Not very. And yet, some things I've tried in the past haven't been up to the challenge.

Wood core with coconut fiber (?) wrapped around it, for plants that climb: basically worthless. Maybe worse than worthless.²
Wooden dowels: good, even if they do eventually rot.
Acrylic rods collected from the garbage of a former employer: never quite big and sturdy enough to support anything that actually needed support.³ A thicker-diameter rod would probably have worked fine, but I'd guess it would be unnecessarily expensive. Plus acrylic scratches really easily, so it wouldn't look transparent and shiny for very long.
Bamboo: depends on the diameter. Thick ones work well, thin ones don't.⁴ The thin greenish-blue dyed ones are awful and I have no idea how the companies producing and selling them stay in business.
Thin metal rod of unknown origin which is also somehow green: better than nothing, but too short for most of the plants that need support.

Wood dowels and (thick) bamboo are perfectly fine, and sometimes even blend in with the real stem, for woody plants like Coffea or Murraya. Wood and bamboo eventually rot, though usually by the time that happens, either the plant has become self-supporting and it doesn't matter that the stake has rotted, or it's time to move the plant to a bigger pot anyway, so you may as well change the stake too. That said, wooden dowels are pretty expensive to be using as stakes, and either you have to choose one that's really tall and let the plant catch up, or choose one that's the same height as the plant and let the plant overrun it. This is not, like, Hitler bad, or even root mealybug bad, but I've usually chosen the first option and then silently resented the bare top of the stake until the plant caught up or the stake needed replacing. So my favorite part about the Ultimate Plant Stakes is how easily their height can be adjusted.

The Ultimate Plant Stakes improve on other things I've tried in other ways: you should only have to buy them once, unlike wood or bamboo, they don't break or bend, and the price is in the same ballpark as comparable products like bamboo stakes and wood dowels, so I feel comfortable endorsing the product. They definitely work well for my Dracaena 'Limelight,'

The angle hides the lowest 3/4 of each stake somewhat, but they're there.

and although they don't get the Asplundia 'Jungle Drum' completely vertical, they're more effective than anything else I've tried.⁵

A single stake, as packaged, is only useful for plants with stems from about 12 to 48 inches (30-122 cm) tall. Shorter than 12 inches and the stakes are overkill; taller than 48 inches and the top of the plant remains free to flop about. The stakes come in packages of six, though, and it's possible to use more than one stake at a time to get something taller than that. Each stake consists of an outer tube, an inner stake, and a white plastic cap. If you remove the cap and stagger the outer tubes and inner stakes, you can go higher than that. I don't know how much higher you can usefully go, but I managed to stake the length of my 60-inch (152 cm) tall Ficus lyrata by using three stakes together, so the useful range is at least 60 inches.⁶

The stake is mostly not visible here either, but you can see the bottom fifth of it to the right of the stems.
So to summarize:

Ultimate Plant Cage: testing incomplete, due to lack of fair test cases.
Ultimate Plant Clips: I don't object to them, but I don't really see the point.
Ultimate Plant Stakes: endorsed, and even kind of enthusiastic about, for plants within the useful height range.

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¹ The company's site says the clips will hold stems up to 1/2 inch in diameter, but I found the effective maximum stem diameter was a little bigger than that, about 3/4 inch (1.9 cm), when used along with the Ultimate Plant Stakes. This is large enough for most vining plants (though, again, if your problem is a Monstera then you're out of luck), but may or may not be adequate for upright woody plants like Dracaena, Yucca, older Ficuses, Asplundia, Dieffenbachia, etc. So measure the diameter of the stems first.
I tried, just for shiggles, to see whether it was possible to link multiple clips together to make a multi-clip with a larger diameter, but that didn't work.
It's probably worth pointing out that this is a good thing in some respects -- you don't have to worry about the clip strangling a stem as it grows, because the clip will pop open once the stem gets big enough to pop it. I don't know how often that problem actually arises, but I'm willing to accept this as a good quality for plant clips to have because the website says it is.
² I've used those before with Monstera deliciosa, and I think maybe also Syngonium podophyllum. Coir doesn't actually hold water for shit when it's in a thin layer around a wood core, so the roots don't anchor themselves in it, and the stakes I've used had short, wide bases and were easily pulled over when I tied the plant to them. So I'm not a fan. I've seen similar stakes that had sort of a plastic mesh over a layer of sphagnum, with a solid (wood? plastic?) core at the center of that: it seems like those might be more effective for clinging aerial roots to use as support, but I've never actually tried one. And they seemed to have the same problem with bases. Nothing is going to hold up a heavy vining plant unless you can anchor it solidly in the soil.
³ They make very good dibblers, though. And I do a lot of dibbling, so it was worth keeping them.
⁴ It should probably also be noted that I have never experienced, or heard of anyone experiencing, bamboo stakes on a plant kept indoors leading to "hives" of insects of any kind, nor any insects at all, as the ad copy on the Ultimate Plant Stakes suggests.
⁵ The Asplundia is sort of an impossible case all around -- the part of the stem at the soil line is fairly narrow and weak, so the plant is both top-heavy and unstable. It's also difficult to get stakes very close to the stem, because the leaves are so broad and numerous that it's impossible to place a stake anywhere without it poking through a leaf. It still has a slight lean, and required two of the Ultimate Plant Stakes to get that far, but this is the most verticality it's managed in years.

⁶ Though it should probably be noted that stakes which are extended in this way don't stand up well in 16 mph (kph) winds with gusts of 25 mph (kph), as I discovered while trying to get a photo of the Ficus lyrata for this post. This is probably not relevant to you, since you probably don't have 16 mph winds in your home (or if you do, you probably have bigger worries than keeping your houseplants upright), but it may be relevant if you're trying to stake something outdoors.

Question for the Hive Mind: Amorphophallus

The Amorphophallus konjac is back for another year, and for the first time has produced multiple leaves, which is exciting. The main leaf is at least double the size of last year's.

In addition, 2014 is seeing the premiere of Amorphophallus bulbifer, which I got from a reader. Its leaf came up first, before there was enough light for it, and as a result the petiole was stretched and floppy. It also had a mysteriously bad spider mite infestation flare up just before I put it outside for the summer. But these things do happen, and it didn't seem likely to affect the plant in the long term, so I was willing to roll with it.

Last year, there had been a problem with the A. konjac blowing over in the wind, so this year, I prepared for that by setting both plants in tall, heavy cachepots. And that lasted for maybe four days.

Left: A. konjac. Right: A. bulbifer.
And then there was some wind one evening, not even very strong wind, really, and I awoke the next morning to this:

I guess the leaves are going to die then. I suppose that means the tubers are gone too. Oh well, I thought, suddenly nonchalant at the prospect of losing plants I'd been very happy about a few days prior.

Except that the leaves haven't died. The petioles are still bent, but a few days after bending, they still appear to be functional, even after a second evening of wind blew them back the opposite direction. Which leads to the questions:

1) If the leaves did die, does that automatically mean that the tubers will die too? Will they try to make replacement leaves? If so, should I be cutting them off now so that the tubers can send up a (hopefully sturdier) replacement before the summer's over?
2) Should I be trying to, I dunno, put a splint on the petioles or something? I figure sticking in an actual stake is probably no good (since any stake shoved into the soil next to the petiole will hit and maybe damage the tuber), but I could surely find something to attach to the petiole to keep it straight, if that's something I should be doing.

EDIT: The species name is actually A. bulbifer, not A. bulbiferum. PATSP regrets the error.

Pretty picture: Bratonia Charles M. Fitch 'Izumi'

I had the strong feeling that I've seen something a lot like this before, when I went to start writing the post on it, but whatever flower I was remembering, I couldn't find it when I looked back through all the posts tagged "Orchidaceae." (This one was the closest I found, and its only similarity is in the shape, when what I was remembering as similar was the color.) So who knows what I was thinking. Maybe I've seen so many orchids now that they're all blurring together for me.

Bratonia Charles M. Fitch 'Izumi' = Brassia verrucosa x Miltonia spectabilis (Ref.)

New Plant

So, do you remember in the genetics post where I said that if anybody wanted to provide me with an Anthurium 'Midori' so I could pursue my dream of green- and brown-blooming Anthurium seedlings, they should feel free to do so?

An anonymous donor did.

I'm not sure if the color is right or not. The first set of photos I took came out a lot more yellow than it seemed in real life, but I tried again on a different day and got basically the same thing, so maybe the pea-soup / algae-pond green is how it actually looks, and it's my brain that's getting it wrong.

So far, everybody who's seen it in person (myself, husband, parents and two siblings) has had exactly the same reaction: an initial oh, hey, that's neat followed by a but . . . so that's all it does, though? That's a little weird. I don't know if I like that.

I still haven't decided whether I like it myself, as a plant to look at and care for. But as a plant to breed, I'm very excited. (Unfortunately, few of the Anthuriums here are shedding pollen at the moment, so I don't expect this bloom to lead to berries. I'm all over the next bloom, though.)

For anyone who might be interested, I ordered this from Aloha Hawaiian Flowers, which was the only place I could find online that sold whole 'Midori' plants, as opposed to cut flowers. No complaints about the company or the plant; I was a little irritated that the only shipping option I was given was 2-day FedEx, because that was expensive (as 2-day shipping would be for any two points separated by 3900 miles and half an ocean), but on the other hand, I got to choose the day it would arrive, it arrived when they said it would, and there was no damage to the plant from shipping, not even a creased leaf. So the shipping cost was arguably worth it. I did have to repot the plant when it arrived -- it had been potted in what I assume was black lava gravel, which I thought would probably not work as well indoors as it does outdoors in Hawaii. The plant has shown no sign of being traumatized by the shipping or repotting.

And now, we begin the long wait for pollination, and everything that comes after pollination. Best-case scenario, I'll have a 'Midori' cross blooming in January 2016 or so.

More Anthurium stuff

It is no longer possible to stretch the definition of "mid-June" to continue doing mid-June Anthurium seedling updates, but I still have stuff from the book to talk about, so.

A lot of what's left falls into the category of "things I'd noticed myself, but it's nice to have the book confirm it for me anyway." Plus there are a few things I could have noticed if I had been paying closer attention, but only became certain about after taking regular photographs of all the blooms over a period of a couple months.

For example, spadices move over time. When the spathe first opens, the spadix will be lying more or less parallel to it, but as time passes, the spadix becomes more, um, let's call it "perpendicular," to the spathe. We'll let #097 "Colin Ambulance" demonstrate this.

You also probably noticed that Colin changed color too.¹ Not all Anthurium blooms do that to the same degree, and they don't all change color in the same direction,² but enough of them do that it's been sort of surprising to see the changes when I look back at the photos. The book doesn't mention this having much effect on their commercial viability, which surprised me. Certainly it doesn't seem to be a problem for the plants that I see for sale:

NOID Anthurium spotted at Wallace's, during the orchid show in March. I'd guess that the one on the left is the older of the two.
I've also finally begun to understand the mentions of spadix color changes that I've been seeing for as long as I've been reading on-line about Anthuriums. Taking pictures helps.³

When Anthurium spathes first open, the spadices are usually a uniform color. (If the spathe is red, the spadix is usually yellow, occasionally green; if the spathe is pink, the spadix is usually pink.) As the inflorescence ages, a different color, usually white (for red spathes) or lavender (for pink spathes) appears at the base and moves toward the tip. A third color sometimes appears after that, again moving from base to tip. That's usually brown, but I've also seen red and green.

Because I'm usually more interested in the spathe than the spadix when I'm taking photos, I don't have great pictures of this, but here's the progression for one inflorescence of #245 "Sawyer Ad," as it changes from yellow to white to yellow-green:

(From left to right: March 24, April 15, May 5, May 15, May 23, May 30, June 9, June 18, June 24.)
The color change is related to the maturity of the individual flowers on the spadix, which you can tell by the way that the base of the spadix is starting to get lumpy, the way Anthurium spadices do when they've been pollinated, just after it turns green This is one of those things that has long puzzled me -- everybody always notes that the spadix changes color as the flowers mature, but nobody ever specifies the timing or explains how: do they mature just before the color change? Just after? As best as I can tell, the flowers are most receptive to pollen during the white phase, and are finished by the time the third color comes along. Here's #239 "Russ Teanale," which got pollinated a lot more thoroughly, for comparison:

(From left to right: April 15, April 18, May 5, May 15, May 23, May 30, June 9, June 17, June 24, June 29.)
From the look of that, the lowest flowers were already receptive to pollen on April 18 (2nd from left), and had definitely been pollinated by May 23 (5th from left). Not sure what was happening during the month in between, but it's at least consistent with the idea that the window of opportunity is indicated by the second spadix color, whatever it happens to be.⁴

This doesn't have a lot of consequences for me, but it might save me time; I at least don't have to worry about trying to pollinate blooms that are clearly signaling that they're done. It also might help me to get 'Florida' pollinated sometime, since it seems from this that most of the times I've attempted to pollinate it, it hasn't actually been accepting pollen.

There are several more Anthurium-related items to share, which I will get to in time. By the time I'm done with those, there will be even more first-time blooms to show you. (#144 "Graham Reaper" is so pretty, you guys.) And then some more buds will have been produced, and so on and so forth. So if you've been thinking, what I really want to read on PATSP this summer is lots of Anthurium-related posts, I have good news!

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¹ There's some variation because the lighting isn't 100% uniform from one photo session to the next. I've been taking these pictures in the same location, during more or less the same time of day, with the same camera, but the cloudiness varies, and my camera's auto-correct color is a bit of a problem too. So it's not perfect, but it's good enough for you to be able to see what I'm talking about.
² #149 "Heather Boah" is interesting for being one of the few to get darker over time, instead of lighter:

And most of the red spathe / yellow spadix blooms stay essentially the same color no matter how old they get. E.g. #223 "Patty Cake," which lightens very slightly:

The brown tip that appears between May 30 and Jun 18 is the result of it being too close to one of the fluorescent bulbs; it wouldn't have done that had I not accidentally burned it. Also, these photos may exaggerate the amount of color change, since the last two seem to have more light reflecting off the spathe than the first three. I try to keep reflections minimal, but it often doesn't work.
³ As the man said, you can see a lot by just looking. What Mr. Berra neglects to mention is how time-consuming looking can be sometimes.
⁴ I would have tried this with one of the pink/pink blooms, but they tend to have very perpendicular spadices, so I don't usually have consistent in-focus photos of them.

Pretty picture: Bulbophyllum putidum

Random plant event: Zamioculcas zamiifolia

Okay, well, the third part of the Anthurium update just doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon. So we may as well look at the other plants for a bit. A few of them are even doing things.

A very, very long time ago, in the halcyon days of August 2011, I managed to obtain some leaflets of Zamioculcas zamiifolia 'Zamicro' or 'Mini' or something like that. (The cultivar wasn't identified.) And I tried to start some new plants from the leaflets, as you do. Which went well, for once, and a year later I had actual plants, in tiny four-pack cells.

(June 27)
Three years after getting the leaflets, they're all still in four-packs, because I am terrified of repotting them. Repotting Zamioculcas, for me, has always gone badly, and although I think I know why these are doing well when previous Zamioculcas haven't,¹ I am still scared to mess with them in any way. They're growing, I'm happy, they're happy: why fix what ain't broke?

And that's how things have been for quite a while. Then a couple weeks ago, I learned that if anything, I have underestimated how happy they are, because behold:

(From June 13, plus or minus a day.)

That's the first one. I think there are two more on the way. Excitingly, they appear to be at more or less the same stage of development, which means that I might wind up with two flowers blooming at the same time, and you know what happens when I have two aroids blooming at the same time.

(June 27)
Though as long as it takes Zamioculcas to grow from a cutting, I can't imagine what slow kind of torture it is to grow them from seed. You know I'm going to try regardless, but I'm going to be crossing my fingers at the same time in hopes that the pollination fails.

The spathe never really get any prettier than it is in those first couple photos:

(This photo and the next: June 27)
But the way the spadix dries up is sort of interesting.

So that's something that happened. I'll let you know if I get any pollination. As much as I hope I don't wind up with seedlings, I am kind of interested in seeing what the berries and seeds actually look like.

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¹ A gritty, fast-draining soil mix, and shallow soil for the size of the plants. Previously, I'd been using pots with standard dimensions (as wide as tall), and regular potting mix. Short-term, this was usually fine, but given enough time, eventually something would happen and they'd rot.

Pretty picture: Cattlianthe Gold Digger 'Buttercup'

Apologies for the continuing silence. The whole May/June stretch this year has just been one derailment after another: injury, illness, drama. And the drama is not necessarily over.

Posts are still coming, I swear, if things ever calm down enough for me to work on them.

Previously (as Laeliocattleya): 2010

Cattlianthe Gold Digger 'Buttercup' = Cattlianthe Red Gold x Cattlianthe Warpaint (Ref.)