Re: Transporting show stalks

J. Irwin wrote:
> 
> I am in need of the sage advice of other irisarians who have had to transport
> show stalks a fair distance.  Last year was the first year I had ever entered
> a show and tried transporting stalks propped with foam in wine bottles 1/4
> filled with water.  Quite a few were damaged in transport although I ended up
> winning Queen of Show with a stalk of Sterling Stitch that managed to come
> through unscathed!

Julie
Your wine bottle solution sounds interesting. Not knowing what the problem was, it is difficult to design 
some solutions. Stems break? Falls get knocked off? Complete flower broken? One of the problems with a wine 
bottle is that since the botton end of the stalk is not held fast, the neck provides a nice pivot point for 
the stalk to move about.

Assuming that the problem was caused because the stems moved around so much that the damage was done by 
irises banging into each other, perhaps a solution would be to take a piece of coat hanger wire (not the 
flimsy white kind but the thicker brown type) and tape it to the neck of the bottle with some black plastic 
electrical tape so the wire extends upward, parallel to the stem of the iris. You could then fasten the iris 
stem to the wire with a piece of tape (masking or whatever kind) to keep it from swaying with the motion of 
the car. You would need to wrap the tape at least once around the wire so that it wouldn't slide down as you 
drove and not too tightly around the stem so as not to bruise it. For widely branching stems, multiple wires 
at appropriate angles could be used. This is sort of a customized trellis. Not an insignificant amount of 
work.

Did you use a wine bottle cardboard box with the dividers to steady the bottles? Assuming that the back seat 
of your car is sloped like most seats, did you put something on the seat to make the surface that the 
bottles sat on level?

How many stems do you typically take? Maybe a different solution will come to mind.

-- 

John                     | "There be dragons here"
                         |  Annotation used by ancient cartographers
                         |  to indicate the edge of the known world.
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