Tie Up Your Mums To Avoid Flopping - Fall Porch Pro-Tip - October 2024

You just brought home that awesome pot of Mums from Costco (or the pumpkin patch that you went to this past weekend) and put them up by the front door along with some of your pumpkins and gourds.   You're worried about killing them by forgetting to water them - that's very valid.  But, there's another problem you're about to face:  flopping, open-crowned mums.   Some call this 'falling over' and unless you have a number of your mums tucked-in tightly together in a cluster, your mums are going to 'fall over' or flop.  

How do you avoid it?  By using a piece of string or twin or wire to tie them up and keep them held together at the top.  I wrote about this pro-tip back in 2017 - when I encouraged everyone to take a piece of string around the foliage and stems of their mums and tie them together.  I've been doing it ever since.

This year, we went with a monochromatic nursery container of maroon or dark red mums.  I used a piece of padded garden wire (I like the RapiClip  soft tie wire.) about half-way up from the soil to the blooms and pulled the stems in tight.  See below for a couple of photos - first showing the wire around the stems and foliage.  And, the second photo shows the tied-up mums from the top-down: