Plant Labels Aren’t Just For Outdoor Plants

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As the chilly winds wake us up to the reality that winter is here, we gather up our outdoor plants and bring them in to safety. The vegetable plants succumb to a frosty covering as green tomato stems and leaves wilt like cooked spinach and the blooms of fall mums and marigolds wither.

If you are paying attention to the weather forecast, you may dig a few plants or herbs from the garden to bring indoors for the winter before the first hard frost. As you bring in sensitive garden plants and potted plants from your patio, your home transforms into a cozy lush landscape and you can enjoy some green over the winter.

If you have sturdy, weather-resistant plant markers and plant labels then there is no need to bring those markers indoors, but consider how interesting those markers may look in your potted houseplants. Plant labels help us remember plant names and help us relay this information to our visitors. When plants are labeled it shows their importance in the home.

Some people “use” rather than “choose” plants. They use plants to hide an ugly corner of the room or a stain on a table or rug. The end result is still adding beauty to the room, but then there are others who “choose” plants. Those gardeners carefully mull over foliage shapes, textures and hues. They research about care for their plants, where the plant needs to be in the house in order to survive and thrive.

Poinsettia 1Simple, classic plant labels bring character to your precious plants. They draw your visitors over to your plants and those plants aren’t passed by like an empty vase on a bookshelf. While some labels may give names to your greenery, others may be more personal. A plant passed down to you from your grandmother might include her name on the label or one given to you on a special occasion may be “Our Wedding Peace Lily.”

Other labels may help others identify the variety of plant in your home. 220 million poinsettias will be sold in the next month as their beauty fills homes, businesses and churches across the nation. Amazingly, there are over 100 varieties of this popular Christmas plant. Tending for your poinsettia involves monitoring its light and darkness exposure and its soil moisture as well as pruning it back at the right times. If you are one of the lucky gardeners to help it thrive, you might label your plant with the year, “Christmas 2014” and see it rejuvenate and bloom each Christmas season.

Celebrate your indoor plants as well as your outdoor plants by using plant labels and markers like the ones designed by Kincaid Plant Markers. Our 100 percent stainless steel plant markers are designed to withstand the outdoor elements, but their simple beauty can also adorn your indoor plants any season of the year.

The Best Custom Engraved Signs for Plants Come on a Label

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Brother P-Touch Label Printers and AccessoriesEtched engravings sound romantic, but over time, even some etchings can be rubbed away, scratched out or become outdated. Deep engravings on a large stone may be suitable for memorial stones or other large items, but for delicate, yet durable plant markers we’ve come to find that the Brother P-Touch Label System is perfect to stand the test of time, yet can be easily changed if you no longer have that plant in your garden. Your signs can be permanent or temporary—whichever you choose.

Even the most sentimental gardener changes their garden plants over the years. Some perennials just don’t seem to thrive and after a few years may become overpowered by a neighboring plant or by natural elements that do not suit them in the space where they’ve been planted. If you have many plants in your garden, you may not even realize at first that one is missing. But, here is your garden plant marker where your plant used to be and there is no plant to see.

If you had chosen custom engraved signs for plants in your garden, then you are now stuck with a marker that cannot be re-used. That is just one reason why the Brother P-Touch Label System is so rewarding for your plant stakes. When a plant disappears either by your choice you dig it out or by its sad demise, you can just peel off the Brother Label and attach a new one. If you can just peel it off and add a new one, you may think that the labels would eventually fall off, but that’s not the case.

Customized Brother labels rival custom engraved signs for plants in several ways. The labels don’t tear, or peel off or fade. They don’t become dull over time and they can’t be damaged by weathering the way that engravings can be damaged. They are water-proof and don’t fade from the sun’s brilliant rays. When you couple these tough labels with a rust-proof durable plant marker, then you have versatility and a long-lasting plant marker for your garden.

With the Brother label maker you can customize your plant labels and either use traditional plant names or quirky or personal labels to add some whimsy to your garden. If you decide on Thursday that “One-derful Two-lips” isn’t as clever as you thought it was on Tuesday when you labeled it, you can easily print a new label. No later changes can be made after you’ve had it engraved on a plant marker.

Gardens are too dynamic to have labels that will never change. You need marker stakes and plates that will last a lifetime, but labels that can be changed with the addition or subtraction of each green glory in your garden. Kincaid Plant Markers offers you durable, attractive, 100 percent stainless steel plant markers that are the best custom engraved signs for plants. Your personalized labels can reflect your personality and the diversity of your garden.

A Quality Plant Label Makes a House Plant a Home Plant

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House Plants 1Plant labels in your garden help you remember names, remember what you planted where and help visitors learn about your garden, too. But plant labels aren’t just for outdoor gardens. For those of you who love to adorn your house with lush green plant life, a quality plant label can identify your plant and accent its importance in your home.

If you have a quality plant label tucked in the soil of your house plant, it shows your passion and care for your plants. Your plants weren’t just haphazardly purchased, shoved in corners that were bare and then were forgotten. You are a gardener and your plants are important to you – both those indoors and outdoors.

Adorning your home with plants makes it cozy and beautiful. Decorating with plants is an inexpensive way to give texture and life to rooms. Tall floor plants soften sharp corners and can even make ceilings appear higher. Plants with cascading leaves can trail down rectangular bookcase sides and give dimension to the flat sides. Feathery ferns can take the cold feeling away from a dark-surfaced cold tile or brick fireplace wall. A warm weather plant growing in a sunny spot by the sliding door can make your house feel tropical even in winter.

Kitchens are a natural place to use your plants for both decorating and purpose. Potted herbs can fill a windowsill with fragrance and texture and be easily at hand to pluck and throw into soups and stews. With a beautiful quality plant label for each herb, you have added informational design to each pot. Herbs aren’t the only plants that will make your kitchen more attractive. A variety of plants with various types of leaves will soften flat cabinets and warm hard tile floors. Plants can rise out of pots and cascade out like green fountains to even create fixtures in the center of floors.

Indoor plants help collect dust and can clean the air in your house. Be sure to gently dust your plant leaves periodically so that your hardworking plants won’t become smothered in house dust. Hold the leaf in one hand and with the other hand run a damp dust cloth down the face of the leaf, taking care not to pull the leaf from the plant as you pull the damp cloth across the leaf’s surface. With a spritz of water on the leaves the plant can create some moisture in the air during the dry days of winter and can keep collecting irritating indoor air particles.

Kincaid Plant Markers can create the quality plant label that makes your plants more than just some leaves in a corner of the room. Our custom plant labels allow you to put the common name or Latin name of your plant on the plate. The 100 percent classic stainless steel posts will never decay and will blend in nicely with kitchen stainless appliances or with the décor in any room of the house.

Labels for Herbs Help You Keep Your Coriander in the Kitchen and Your Peppermint in Your Pot of Tea

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icon-img-rev_plantmarker-label_400px[1]Edible, fragrant, beautiful and versatile are herbs. Each plant makes its own impression on your taste buds and sense of smell. The relaxing scent of lavender. The nose-tickling fragrance of mint. The spicy taste of cilantro. All of these herbs and more create their own thematic gardens in your yard. With so many leafy combination possibilities in your yard, you may want to use some labels for herbs in your gardens.

Do you like natural medicine, fragrant homemade soups, stews and sauces, or do you like aromatic non-caffeine refreshments? If any of these sound refreshing to you, then you are probably an herb person. Herbs are used in so many ways including cooking, tea and medicine.

If you have a small yard, you may not have a lot of choices of where to plant your herbs. You may have to mix them with your other perennials in flower beds and hope that other plant leaves don’t compete too much with your little-leafed herbs. But certain herbs thrive in sun or shade or wet or dry spaces and these preferences need to be addressed before they are planted.

Herbs can be planted in some very unique theme plantings. A Tuscan garden may include oregano, basil, parsley and garlic. If you are more of a French cuisine person you may have a culinary herb garden of rosemary, marjoram and thyme. Either way, your garden has a culinary theme where you can snip and smash and pluck leaves from their stems minutes before chopping them and releasing their fragrance or leaving them whole as a garnish on a plate.

You may be more interested in growing herbs for medicinal purposes. In the medicinal herb garden you may find fenugreek, eucalyptus, and chamomile. Natural herbal medicines don’t have side effects and don’t cost anything but a little time in experimenting with the right recipes for good health.

If you are not a coffee drinker, then you might prefer tea to help you get through the day. An herbal tea garden would have labels for herbs like mint, chamomile, or lemongrass. You can grow and dry tea leaves to use throughout the year. You know that the herbs grown in your yard are grown under your own gardening practices and not someone else’s.

We at Kincaid Plant Markers can help you create labels for herbs that are just right for your taste. We can help you find your herbs with nameplates or we can make customized plates that bring out your creative and witty side. Oregano can be “Oregano” or it can be “Mom’s Spaghetti Sauce Partner.” Whatever your favorite label, we can make it just the way you like it—no stove necessary.

Markers for Roses Should be as Hardy as the Tough Plants They Mark

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Roses 2If your roses are pretty winter hardy, then the approaching cold overnight temperatures probably don’t have you worried. If you have hardy rose plants, then you don’t have to do much to protect them over the winter. Other species of roses will need some special winterizing care. If you love roses you probably have a variety of bushes and blooms. Markers for roses will help you highlight your gorgeous fragrant beauties in their growing season and help you mark the places of your different varieties after the last petals fall off the green stems.

Not all roses are fragile. Some roses don’t need any preparation or may just need some minimal care before winter. A little compost, extra water and some fertilizer for the roots might give your roses some extra support over the non-growing season, but is not always essential. Get to know your species of rose and if it will need winter care in your climate region.

Some gardeners suggest that you cut the rose stems back to only a few feet off the ground so that winter’s snows don’t bend over and snap long canes. Other experts suggest that if you cut back stems that you should put some type of petroleum jelly over the cut wound. Exposed canes could get wet moisture inside, freeze and damage the growth or parts of the rose bush.

For more fragile roses, it is important to keep them snug and cozy over the winter. It will depend on where you live as to how to best winterize your plants. Local horticulturist groups and garden societies can help you plan for winter and offer tried and true plant survival strategies for the region in which you live. One suggestion for protecting roses from winter is to use a chicken wire silo and mound of dirt to insulate the plant. After placing chicken wire around the plant you can fill the silo with about eight inches of soil in a mound over the plant. Then fill the rest of the wire silo with leaves.

Sturdy plant markers for roses should be able to tolerate the wind, water and ice of winter. If the markers are 100 percent stainless steel, they won’t rust away through the transitions of wet to dry days. They will be forever a classic silver to complement your classic roses. Some roses have survived for generations and remain as heirlooms and beautiful signatures of beloved ancestors. So they will never be forgotten, markers for roses can keep the names of those varieties living for the next generation.

At Kincaid Plant Markers we can make sure your roses have reliable markers and we can even personalize markers with names like “Grandma’s Hybrid Tea Roses” or “Mom’s Queen Elizabeth Roses” in remembrance of the first gardener of those roses. We can help you celebrate the coming of spring in your rose garden and guarantee that your roses won’t get lost in a winter’s night.

Markers for Herbs Help You Keep Track of Your Season-ings

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Autumn’s arrival brings with it the first calendar warning that a frost could come at any time now. That first frost can mar the leaves of basil to spotty black and cut short the season of other delicious herbs. With another summer garden season coming to a close, you’re ready to harvest all those delicious greens and dry them for the winter. As you prune back those fragrant leaves, your markers for herbs will help you find them once again in the spring for the ones that you have left to re-seed.

If you’ve had a productive summer of snipping herbs here and there for salads, pastas, grilledHerbs 1 meats and veggies and other dishes, then you might have a bounty of greens to snip back and save for winter. When you snip your herbs back, don’t snip them all the way to the ground. Gardeners suggest leaving at least a couple inches of growth on the plants so they have some energy in the spring to get a start.

After washing your herbs under the faucet, you can dry them in various ways. Fasten the ends together with a rubber band or twist tie and hang them upside down. You can even turn them into a decorative piece while they are drying by hanging them from a wall rack or coat rack, the curtain rods in the kitchen or breakfast nook or you can even take down some wall hangings and let your herbs be the art for a week or so. Don’t leave the herbs up much longer than they need to be to turn crisp enough to crumble or you’ll be adding some accumulated dust to your herb containers. Other old herb containers can be washed and re-used for your home harvest.

Your plant markers for herbs will help you find those shaved herbs once again in the spring. Some hardy herbs will spring back up while others may not. Do your research on which herbs need to be dug up and taken inside for the winter and which ones will re-seed and come right back with gusto!

Herbs tend to be healthiest when you continually prune them throughout the season. If you often cook with herbs, this will probably happen naturally. At some point, herbs that are left to grow will spend their energy putting on flowers and seeds rather than more bushy leaves. If you want those herbs to come back in the spring, you may want to prune much of the plant to keep a good harvest of herbs throughout the summer and then let some of the plant flower so that the seed will fall to the earth and produce the next year.

When spring 2015 arrives, use your markers for herbs, like ones created by Kincaid Plant Markers, to find the spots where last year’s herbs were sprouting. Our markers will prevent you from digging up tender roots if you’re putting in some new plants and will have you ready for a new season of spicing up your favorite foods.

 

Markers for Irises Will Separate Your Deep Purples From Your Deeper Purples

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Iris 2With over 300 species of irises available to grow in your gardens, you might need some kind of plant labels to help you tell one from the other. Markers for irises will help you differentiate species that have even the most subtle purple hue changes. Irises come in bright yellows, deep purples and many shades in between. While irises are very hardy plants, common in many gardens, they need to have some special care in order to keep their blooms active and keep the whole plant healthy.

Perfect Planting Place

When planting your irises, put them in a spot where for at least half of the day they will have a good amount of full sunshine. Irises need plenty of sunshine in order for them to bloom. Otherwise, you might just have a nice clump of tall grassy-looking leaves. Markers for irises come in very handy when this might happen.

Over time your garden’s environment might change in subtle ways without you realizing it right away. As small trees begin maturing, they may start casting shadows and causing shade in places that used to be sunny spots. A sunny corner where you may have once planted irises may eventually turn into a shady corner when that oak tree climbs into your yard’s sky. This is the time to move your irises and your plant markers with them. It’s best to plant them just after their blooms have faded.

Don’t Pack Them In

The Farmer’s Almanac recommends that irises be thinned, generally, every two to five years to keep the flowers blooming and to keep the plant from becoming too crowded. When irises are left alone they become thickly overgrown. When they are packed too tightly together, sun and air can’t reach their rhizomes and they become vulnerable to moisture, rot and disease. You may have the instinct to completely keep iris rhizomes covered with dirt, but theses rhizomes need to be exposed to sunlight and ventilation.

When you divide your irises, it’s recommended that you check the rhizomes for borers that will destroy your plant. Besides a few pesky insects and too much moisture, not much else will destroy your hardy irises. Troublesome backyard deer won’t graze on them and irises won’t wither away in the hottest of summer days. We love them for their elegant petals with such intricate veins or their interesting fragrance or their comforting color, but we also love their strength and hardiness.

Irises need to be divided in order to keep up their beautiful blooms. When you divide them and spread them around to sunny places in your yard, you may want to order some more plant markers to add to the newly transplanted groupings. Plant markers for irises, like the ones manufactured by Kincaid Plant Markers, will help you keep track of where all those different species may move to around your yard.

Winter Labels for Herbs Will Help You Welcome Spring

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Identifying Plants 1The difference between cooking and baking is spontaneous creativity—well, at least with measurement and ingredients. Baking is an exact science—not enough or too much flour or making the mistake of using margarine instead of butter could completely ruin your cookies or your bread. But, when you cook you can experiment until you fix it just the way you like it. An extra few dashes of red pepper flakes or Worcestershire in a sauce or another handful of oregano in the mashed potatoes lets you control your ingredients.

Having an herb garden just outside your kitchen keeps you just a few steps away from fragrant, savory palate-pleasing leaves that can add such flavor to your meats, soups, sauces, eggs, vegetables and more. Garden experts can recommend multiple plans for herb gardens from formal to mixing the herbs in with other perennials.

Some herbs will thrive and sprawl around your garden, while others will grow more vertical than horizontal and stay mostly in their own space. When your herbs start to creep together in lovely lush clumps, labels for herbs will help you find the spots where your plants originated. The labels for herbs will help protect the central root system as you cut away the outer fringes for cooking and for drying.

Just because winter is coming, it doesn’t mean that you’ll lose all your fresh herbs. Some herbs, like parsley, may keep growing through mild winters while others, like basil, will perish with the first frost. For the hardy herbs, like oregano, you can simply cut back what you’d like to dry and then cover the plant lightly with some soft mulch like pine needles or hay. In the spring, fresh leaves will be ready to be enjoyed in the kitchen once again after you remove the winter mulch.

Other herbs, like rosemary, might not fare so well outside in the frost and snow but can be uprooted, potted and taken into the house over the winter. Don’t worry about ruining your beautiful garden lay-out. Your labels for herbs will remind you from where you extracted each herb and where you can plant it back again in the spring. Plant markers save time and reduce anxiety in finding where plants used to be planted and where to replace them in the spring.

At Kincaid Plant Markers, we wish you not only success in your garden, but in your kitchen, too! Using our 100 percent stainless steel plant markers for your herbs can help you find your herbs each spring. Some of your herbs might not be able to survive the sting of winter, but our plant markers can. When you uproot your fragile herbs this fall, plant a dependable plant marker of ours– if you don’t already have our markers next to the foliage of your herbs. Let us help you hold a place for your “snowbird” herbs so when they return again in the spring, their space will be all ready for them.

Planting a Permanent Metal Garden Marker to Last Throughout the Winter

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Winter Garden 1As we start to thrill at the first cool fall evening, weekend of bonfire wiener roasts, and the colorful display of Midwestern deciduous trees, there is also work to be done. Our last few tomatoes might be taking longer to turn from green to red as the temperature cools and our other plants might be starting to spot or turn brown.

After the harvest is clean-up time—not so much to make it look nice while under snow cover, but to keep disease from harboring in the garden and to get the garden bed ready for spring. It’s also time to make sure your plant markers are in place so that you can recognize where and when your different plant species will rise again in the spring. If you use a permanent metal garden marker you can depend upon it to survive the winter and be there for you every spring.

After you’ve harvested those last few vegetables, remove the old plant material. Leaving it behind can also leave behind garden pests that can overwinter or rotting leaves that can damage your plants next spring. A clean sweep can give new, young tender plant shoots enough sunlight, space and nutrients without becoming affected by the smothering dead plant material of last year. In order to protect your topsoil from the winter elements, you can choose to apply a layer of mulch.

Along with preparing your vegetable gardens and even your lawn for the next spring, you can prepare your flower beds, too. Some gardeners choose to leave their flower heads and stems on their plants all throughout the winter. Some flower heads provide seeds for birds in fall and winter and provide protective winter cover for birds, rabbits and squirrels when the days are icy and the winds are shrill. The choice is yours. Do you want to have more garden work in the fall or the spring? However, if any leaves have any type of disease in the fall you should remove those leaves. The leaves from healthy plants can provide free mulch for your topsoil.

One item you can keep in your garden all winter is your garden plant markers—if they are made of 100 percent stainless steel. Markers, like the ones we make at Kincaid Plant Markers will last throughout all seasons. Neither snow nor rain will rust away stainless steel. It will be a permanent metal garden marker for your plants.

As you clean up your yard this fall, keeping in mind what you need to do to start your vegetable and flower beds off to a good start in the spring, consider using a permanent metal garden marker to label each of those special plants in your yard. Fall is a good time to move your plants around as the growing season slows. Moving your garden markers with your new transplants will help you remember those great remodeling plans you had in the fall. Happy fall clean-up and planning for next year!

Metal Garden Markers Can Help You Find Your Seedlings no Matter What the Season

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Garden Markers 1It may be true that only certain flowers bloom in the spring, but that’s not true of many vegetables. Dutchman’s Breeches, Spring Beauties, Lily-of-the-Valley, and Crocuses announce that it’s time to open the windows after winter’s cold has finally subsided. Those flowers have their seasonal moments and won’t blossom again until the following spring. Sturdy metal garden markers can help remind you where those once-a-year beauties will bloom among your other flowers.

But some of those spring sprouts that you anticipate all winter long can come back again for you in the fall. You don’t have to wait a full year for their return. Many of the seeds that you so carefully sew in the late winter months can be sewn again when the weather is getting ready to cool. Spinach, sugar snap peas, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce and other vegetables thrive in cooler weather, whether it is spring or fall.

If you have used metal garden markers in the spring to mark where your vegetables were originally planted, you can replant in the same spot. If your summer vegetables are overtaking that old spring patch, then metal garden markers that can be easily taken out of the ground and moved around are perfect for being re-staked in the new fall spot for your cool-weather vegetables.

In order to enjoy those delicious spring vegetables again in the fall you have to have the best sense of when to plant them. There’s no calendar that shows the exact certain date of your backyard’s first hard frost. If it were only so easy, right? But some early planning could allow you to get those seeds in the ground about the right time and then be able to enjoy the growth and prosperity of your garden plants throughout the growing season.

Some of these seeds need to be sewn between 12 and 14 weeks before the first frost. Garden planners for your region’s zone can give you insight as to when certain vegetables need to be planted in order to produce at their fullest and avoid an early frost. Some vegetables don’t like to be too cold, while others may keep pushing up their leaves through snowy soil. The hardiness of many vegetables is amazing.

When you put your spring or fall vegetable seeds in the ground, it is easy to forget what you planted where. Using metal plant markers like the ones made by Kincaid Plant Markers can help you keep organization in your garden. Kincaid’s stainless steel metal plant markers will weather all seasons—the heavy rains of spring and the icy snow of winter. They won’t rust or corrode and they are easy to stake into the ground and pull out and re-stake when you need to re-plant or transplant.

You don’t put a lot at stake when you try cool-season vegetables in the spring and fall or when you stake your plants with Kincaid plant markers. Both will help your garden flourish when cooler weather is in the air.