Trellises
One of the reasons I haven’t taken proper care of my hoyas is because when I repot small plants I want to have a trellis from the start. Good trellises are hard to find and usually expensive to buy but I found a good and inexpensive variety at a garden centre. Have a look at the picture to the right and you can see that it’s a net made from galvanized net. I cut the net with a pair of nippers into appropriate size and make it into a tower. It’s easy to make any size of tower depending on your pot.
The only really negative thing with this construction is that it’s time consuming and I never have one hoya to repot but usually several of them at a time. And I am lazy…
So what to do but to come up with a quick version of the galvanized net. I cut out a strip of net usually only one square in width or maybe two if I anticipate the hoya to become heavy, top left picture. I leave some of the vertical bars in either end to form some kind of feet for the trellis. I grab the strip and bend it by moving the “feet” together forming almost a circle. After that I put the feet down into the pot and adjust it a bit before filling up with soil and putting in the small hoya plant.
This way it’s very easy to make smaller trellises as well as bigger ones although for the really heavy hoyas, like Hoya kerri, I think
I may still rely on the tower construction. The picture to the right shows the same hoya as the one to the left two years later.
Putting H. imperialis on a one strip trellis is still a bad idea...