Tag it!

Last Christmas I got an interesting pair of unplanned gifts.  Brett got me these little metal punch letters that I'd been talking about, and Sharon and Andy got me copper plant tags (I think we'd talked about it like a year or two before - she's got a great memory OR is good at keeping notes about gift ideas).  Either way, they were both surprised to see the others gift because they hadn't compared notes, and yet the gifts were a perfect match!

So back in April I spent some time making up plant tags for a bunch of my trees (mostly the fruiting ones), trying different techniques - handwritten with a ball point pen version letter stamped, using fingers to hold the stamps vs pliers, to rub permanent marker down into the punched letter or not, etc.  I found my preferred combination was to use the stamps with pliers, and I think the permanent marker does make the letters stand out a little more over time, but I don't know that that'll really hold up over the years, so it's probably not something I would bother with.

Check out the patina the tag above has started to develop!

Notice how the wire is coiled - I learned that's one of the best ways to hang them from the tree - the added spring/slack gives the wire room to expand without cutting into the bark as the tree grows.  I'm sure it's going to be quite awhile before my trees really need to take advantage of the extra slack, but better to plan in advance for something like this!

I put in a couple European/Italian plum trees this year after removing one of the sand plum shrubs.  Those two trees still have their original plant tags from the store on them, so I need to spend some boring indoors time this winter making at least two more plant tags....

I don't know about you, but I feel like these tags lend a bit of sophistication to the trees!