I recently bought some garden products I was very unimpressed with, so I thought I would try to save anyone else from going to the trouble only to find themselves disappointed.
Pyramid Cane Caps
Cane is the British English word for what Americans would call bamboo stakes, and these caps shown on the right side of the picture are supposed to be used to make teepees for supporting peas or beans.
While this is a good idea, this product is just not well made. The plastic these are made from has no grip, and the canes/stakes just slip out with the very slightest of provocation. They are not even cone shaped, and the plastic is not very flexible, really limiting the diameter of bamboo stake/cane they will accept, since all canes/stakes are slightly different sizes anyway.
They really are not useful in any way, and a complete waste of money.
In addition, in sunlight the plastic becomes soft, and I think it’s very unlikely these would last any more than a season or two of use. This is even if you were to find them somehow useful.
Build-A-Ball
These are intended to be used in the construction of garden cages, and suffer from similar problems as the cane caps above.
These are made from very hard plastic, and the holes are made to a very specific size. Supposedly you can use these with normal canes/stakes to build garden cages of custom sizes, but in reality normal canes/stakes don’t fit without some considerable effort (cutting and whittling) and even then the resulting structures are not strong enough to be useful. I did not try the special poles you can purchase with them, but I wouldn’t expect them to be any better and after you have bought the balls and the poles, the total cost is too high anyway.
These too are in my opinion not useful in any way.
The basic idea behind the cane caps and build-a-ball is a good one, and I’d like to hear from anyone who has managed to get home made versions of these kinds of things working.
I’d never seen those caps before, but I remember you and a couple other bloggers mentioning the build-a-balls. Too bad they don’t work well–the idea behind them is pretty cool.
We make cages and teepees out of bamboo pretty often, and we’ve always had good results using plain old string and some creative tying to hold the corners together. The good thing about bamboo poles is that you can use the little ridges between each segment to get a bit of traction for the string–that way it doesn’t slip lower than you intend for it to sit.
It’s great to get these kind of warnings, as one sometimes is lures into buing unuseful things.
Hi Meg,
I like the idea of just using string. It’s probably what will work best in the long run. What I need to find is a string that’s biodegradable, but still strong enough. Most other people in the garden complex use plastic cable ties, and the place is littered with them. I want to make sure I’m not the source of a litter problem.
Gardeners’ twine is what you need Patrick. Ties things well for the season and then nicely rots away on the compost heap.
It comes in green or brown shades…
Patrick,
To protect eyes from cane ends go to a public park with tennis courts and you’ll probably find lots of tennis balls near the courts that players have left behind/lost etc or ask at a tennis club for discarded balls. Cut an opening in the ball with a serrated knife/bread knife (it’s easier and safer to cut rather than try to puncture a whole) and place over the cane end. Mine have lasted for years and they are heavy enough so they don’t blow off in the wind.
Yeah, the string is an issue. We initially used some kind of natural fiber twine, but it either broke if you pulled it too tight or broke down over the course of the season. Now we use mason’s string which is definitely not natural or biodegradable, but the upside is that we’ve been using the same pieces for three years running.
Another type of string that we use a lot is lumber string (at least, that’s what the person who gave it to us said it was called. A Google search doesn’t know what I’m talking about). It’s kind of like a flat shoelace, in that if you push a small section together it will expand and the individual strings will separate, but if you pull it tight the strings tighten against one another and it gets really snug. As far as I can tell it’s just cotton, but it’s somewhat thick and has held up for at least two seasons in many places.