Amazing Amaryllis Trick

 One of the seasonal joys is the spectacularly beautiful amaryllis.   Those big bulbs that you may be given at Christmas but are too much fuss to actually deal with on Christmas Day.  They are then at risk of being set aside until you have time in the New Year perhaps.  

Given t.l.c. they soon begin to grow.  And grow.  And grow.

Then they flower abundantly but in so doing they get top-heavy and unless you arrange some support at least one of the stems gives way and over they go.

Anticipating how best to support the plant we soon came to realise that shoving a stake into the pot may not suffice.  There was a risk of skewering the bulb itself or maybe the whole lot - plant plus pot may topple over as one.  In any  case string would be needed and where was the string?

Then stuck a flash of the obvious.  Our amaryllis happened to be right alongside a far larger plant in a far larger pot, against which it had decided to lean anyway:

Both seemed to be enjoying the symbiosis but the risk of failure was still there so they needed securingtogether somehow.  But the string was in the garage and it had been snowing.  An in-house tie was a better option if one could be found.  A quick scan round the kitchen yielded nothing suitable for a tie.

Ah! a tie.  Over a career lifetime of tie-wearing, now happily emancipated, I, like others of my male vintage, have a drawer full of the wretched things (with a clip-on black one for 'those occasions')  Et voila:

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Keep going

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Rather tie-dy eh?

Anybody else found uses for redundant ties?