peg to help propagate new plants from suckers

thingiverse

This is that time of year when everything in the garden that can send out runners does so. Strawberrys started first, and then in my garden came the runners from brambles, thornless blackberrys, raspberrys, with tayberrys and loganberrys competing hard. I have tried on a number of occasions to trap these runners by various ways into a pot so that I can propagate another plant, but a few strong winds -or the neighbour’s cat - seem to disrupt all my efforts. I thought to myself, “What I need is something better than a tent peg to hold these suckers down”. Hence this “thing”. Not an exciting or complex print, but it does the job for me. This is based on an asymmetric u-shaped peg 15mm wide, with one side longer than the other, the longer edge being 91mm long, and the shorter one, 40mm. (these are the z dimensions of each arm) The x dimension is 45mm, and the y, 15mm Each arm is 15x15mm. The longer arm is shaped to allow good retention in the soil, and is short enough to fit smaller plant pots. The body of the peg is smoothed so that it doesn’t hurt your fingers when driving it into the soil. The jpeg shows it straight of a print, with no post processing. It's a bit stringy, but fine. The arms should be pushed into the soil either side of the sucker/runner that you wish to propagate. I’ve found this item very successful so far, holding the sucker firmly in place and allowing roots to form in the pot, so that the sucker can be cut and the new plant be viable. When you print it, always print a pair. Anything with pointy bits at the top tend to melt unless you dive from side to side, giving them time to cool. Notice that the top pointy bits are as far apart as possible on my picture; this gives the least chance of overheating the PLA. If you have any praise or criticism of this, please tell me in the comments.