short stout markers

One of the things that I have found particularly frustrating about Blair's and my daylily hobby is labelling. Once we got into it enough label our daylilies we started using one of the popular types of marker stakes. This kind consists of a tall -- they come in various sizes, generally between one and two feet -- thin dowel with a hinged plate attached at one end.

The idea is to put the label on the flat part of the plate.

These work reasonably well -- to a degree. But there seems to be a problematic fragility to these stakes. They seem to get damaged easily. They get bent out of shape, they come out of the dirt. And sometimes the hinged plate comes off the dowel. For people like me, who are less than fastidious about keeping charts of the locations of various cultivars, this can be real trouble for a garden. Marked pants become NOIDs*. There are plenty of other, similar marker. Many have two stakes that hit the ground. But I'm skeptical about them being much better.

This hit us extremely hard last year, as a pack of wild backhoes and forklifts ran amok in our garden. A lot of our garden was damaged or destroyed, and parts that weren't had more than the usual amount of lost markers. As Blair and I look to recover what we can of the garden, we talked about buying markers.

And Blair suggested we try ordering something that's very different.

These new stakes we ordered are much shorter, but the part that goes into the ground is stouter. And they're made of one piece of metal. I made one label out as a test -- it'll go in the ground tomorrow.

On the downside, I think it'll be harder to read the cultivar name and information, since that will be much lower to the ground and not angled for convenient viewing. But on the upside, I doubt that these will die at nearly the rate of the old ones.

Fingers crossed.

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*NOIDs = No IDs