Cathy Bishop: Expect insects to find roses in spring

Tag: Soap RosesNow
that rose fever has caught hold of most spring gardeners, it's time to get to the nitty gritty. You dug beautiful holes and amended your soil until it looked liked Iowa farmland. You drooled over all the rose varieties and chose your favorites. You gently planted and watered and are watching over your new roses like proud parents. But you go out one morning and there are tiny, but plump - and quite numerous - bright green insects all over the buds. Eek! Welcome to spring. They're just aphids and every gardener will meet them sooner or later. It doesn't mean you're a bad plant parent or that you are doing something wrong: It's just the natural world! We are very fortunate in our climate that there are few insects and diseases that affect roses. In some parts of the country, these things are a huge pain. So what are you going to do? First you are going to decide whether being an organic gardener is important to you or not. Few people eat roses, so many are amenable to using chemical remedies on these plants. There are solutions either way. Because we have thousands of people perusing our roses daily at the nursery, we use as few chemical remedies as possible. For us this means washing the roses every day. One person spends almost the whole day among the 6,000-plus roses keeping them beautiful. We wash first thing in the morning using a brisk spray from a "fogg-it" nozzle to knock off any aphids. This also removes any mildew spores that might have floated in during the night so they don't have a chance to settle on the leaves and cause any damage. Other natural options for aphid control include ladybugs, neem oil (extracted from the bark of an African tree) and soap products. If you don't have time for spraying and washing and want to go the knock-'em-out route, there are several very good systemic insecticides that will keep your plants untouched for anywhere from one to four months at a time. There are two types of insecticides - contact and systemic. The first requires making contact, coating the insect in most cases. The second is applied either foliarly or as a soil drench and the plant takes it up and sends it throughout its vascular system, where it has a dose of poison awaiting any insect that should be so foolhardy as to take a bite or a sip of your plants juices.