Why I Oughta...

My Disneyland Roses have struggled all season.  Not a lot of blooms.  Yet...tons of LOST foliage.  They look bare.  The past week-or-so, I've tried to baby them with water.  And, I just applied the last feeding of the year - with this systemic granular.    I'm hoping that they'll have a strong Fall showing and get fat-and-happy with the weather cooling off a bit now that August is in the rearview mirror.  I'll do my part - and water them more regularly, but, I don't see a way that they get back to what they were last year - at this time - with BIG bunches of blooms and a happy Floribunda bush .  

I'm posting this on May 9th, but these photos date back to May 1st - when I applied the first (monthly) treatment of rose fertilizer and systemic insect treatment.  I have just three Disneyland Roses left after the three that were planted last year failed to survive the Winter.  Roses are 'heavy eaters', so I try to feed them once a month.  I figure...there's no better day than the first of the month to feed them, right?   Below are a couple of photos - first showing the granules that I tossed around the base of the roses.  And then, below, a photo of the container showing the 2-in-1 product:

Earlier this growing season, I discovered that most of our Disneyland Roses were having their foliage destroyed by someone or something.  The leaves were spotted and some of them were eaten-up and looked like lace.  Here's a post from June 2023 that shows one of those eaten-up leaves .   I applied a granular fertilizer all season - starting in early Spring - and I wasn't sure if the foliage damage was a result of the granules clinging to wet leaves, but it seemed far-fetched.   The foliage-eating continued all season, but by July, I decided to take some action and switched from just straight Rose Fertilizer to a 2-in-1 feed and care product from BioAdvance .  My hunch was that SOMETHING was eating the leaves and the 2-in-1 is a 'systemic' product. That means it isn't something that takes root immediately and eliminates the pests.  Rather, it feeds the roses and - via the roots - takes up the insecticide and carries it to all the plant material....

I went out to do a little bit of late Spring/early Summer pruning on the pair of espaliered Greenspire Linden trees in our backyard and noticed something unusual on some of the leaves.  There were these redish/yellow growths that were stuck to the face of some of the leaves.  I first noticed this below: Then, a closer look revealed that certain leaves were covered in these galls: What the heck?   I went to the Web to discover that these are gall mites .  Mites!   After reading more, it turns out that they don't affect the tree's health.  From the Royal Horticulture Society : Like most gall mite there is no harm done to the hosts overall heath and vigour and these animals are part of the biodiversity that healthy trees support. Even knowing that...I still don't like them.  Not one bit.  I went in with a pair of scissors and started to prune out every one of the leaves filled with these galls.  I clipped them off and tossed them in ou...

One of the things that I've had on my last few annual 'to do lists' in the garden is to keep up with various seasonal tasks like feeding, treating, pruning, etc.  Basically....good garden and tree maintenance.  This year, it came in at #16 on the list and included items like feeding the roses ( which I did last week for the first time this season ) and dividing perennials, protecting everything from winter and rabbits and... treating trees.  For the past few years, I've had the fine folks at Davey do an annual deep-root feeding treatment of everything in the yard (in the fall) and I've complemented that application with one of my own on a few select trees.   Start back in 2020, I noticed that our Greenspire Lindens were being covered in Yellow Jackets and upon inspection, it appeared that the trees were inhabited by aphids - which in turn created honeydew - which was what the Yellow Jackets were after.  In order to get rid of the Yellow Jackets, I had to...