An Herb By Any Other Name...

Plant Stakes

I found these on Pinterest and decided to give it a try this weekend. I used Sculpty Original oven-bake clay (white) and a lettering kit from our local craft store. The entire project took about 45 minutes and now the herbs on the back deck have their own little stakes. Admittedly, not hugely practical since there's never that much confusion about which pop has the Rosemary but once the veggies go in to the garden it will be handy to have a reminder to show what goes where. 

Full list of supplies for this project was a little under $20, and I've only used about a quarter of the clay. So, that works out to about 50 cents per stake. It takes a little practice to get the letters just right. I advise keeping a spare chuck of clay on hand to test the label before you actually go to imprint the piece your working on. Somehow my 'E's were always backwards.

I just took a chuck of clay, rolled in into a ball and then rolled it flat. At the beginning I tried to keep the balls roughly the same size but that was a complete waste of time so don't even worry if they're all different sizes at this stage.

I wanted to keep the length and thickness fairly consistent so I used 2 slim CD cases and measured a 2 cm separation. Then used heavy pots or whatever was handy to keep the cases in place while I rolled out the clay in between them.

Then press in the label as deeply as possible without letting the flat part of the letter squares hit the clay.

Then just bake as instructed. In this case it was 275 F for about 18 minutes and let them cool off before planting then in the herb pots.

Next time I'm going to try doing vertical letters, and for the bigger plants I'll make some clay medallions and mount them on tall wire stakes.