Specialty Gardening: Slicing Up A Basket, 1 by heathrjoy

heathrjoy wrote:
Next is to cut holes for the plants and actually plant the basket. That's when I decided I didn't like the mesh tape. It was too flexible. I think it could work if you didn't have anything else to use, or had it on hand and didn't want to spend anymore money.

Here's how it worked for me. I added a small amount of soil to the bottom of the basket and then used an X-acto knife to cut the tape to place the plant in. The cutting went well. I held the tape in place tightly with one hand and cut with the other, I always cut down or towards the center. Sometimes there were a few threads that didn't want to cut and I used scissors for them.

Putting the plant in was the hard part. The tape wanted to pull away from the basket too much. The tape also wasn't wide enough for the plant to fit thru it. I ended up washing the soil off the root ball with running water to make it fit. This worked and didn't hurt the plant, but it's not what I wanted.

Here's a pic of the cut in the tape, which I had to make longer from the top to bottom to even fit in the washed off root ball.