I agree. Its hard to know what the rose is going to do when you see it sitting there at the nursery. All the tags tell you that each one is wonderful and so forth. Even a great rose will not grow well in a bad spot or may have a bad year due to weather or pests. Maybe you happened to get a bad plant. What can you do except try? Colors will be a little different than described and for me the plants are always larger than the book or label says. Some plants poke along for a few years and then magically take off once established. Then there is the matter of rootstocks which change the way the plant grows. Huey roots grow well for me in so cal but I have to worry about virus and larger sized plants than if they were own root plants. What I do these days is grow the mail ordered own root plants when I can. I like the shapes of the plants and they seem to give more new shoots each year. I try to get a virus free plant whenever I can. The small "twiglets" require patience to get going but in my garden, they surpass the grafted ones I can get at the nursery after only a few years. That being said, I still buy the random rose at the nursery just to try it. If I love it, I will usually try to get a virus free one from the mail order later. Getting advice here is the best thing I ever did. Years before I came here, I read a book, got all excited about once blooming antique roses, spent a small fortune mail ordering a bunch of them, waited 4 years and never got one flower. They don't bloom here. It's not cold enough. They are now happily living next to a pretty cabin in Big Bear. You will always have roses that did not meet your expectations and hopefully there will be a growing number of ones that are favorites.

I like rodents. I'm cool with the roof rats, even when they build nests in my wall and cause me to have to tear part of my roof off. But I lost my tolerance for gophers when the woman down the street lost her horse because of a leg broken in a gopher hole. I used enough poison to kill every owl, hawk, and pet cat in Ventura County and STILL didn't get a single gopher. I used anticoagulants, strychnine laced grain, poison gas bombs. I thought about buying a Rodentinator, which uses propane to blow the dang things sky-high. What finally worked for me is plain old metal traps. I buy the good ones with the green coating, because they can be set, whereas the cheap galvanized ones at Home Depot are not well made and you have to re-bend the wires. You have to move fast when you see the mounds, as Hoovb said, and be persistent. You have to dig BIG DEEP holes right in the middle of your garden. It is tedious and time consuming and frustrating and new gophers move in and you have to trap them too. Otherwise, you are just feeding a booming population of gophers, unless everything you grow is in cages. You can eradicate them, though, in suburban contexts if you don't have open fields or slopes nearby. We were gopher-free for years when Mr. Brock lived next door because he was a master trapper. Now that he's gone, I have shouldered the heavy responsibility of keeping the neighborhood gophers at bay. Sigh. Here is a photo of what Hoovb described. The main tunnel is below the side tunnels, usually quite deep. Two metal traps are set, one for each side of the tunnel. Wire attaches them to the trowel so the rodents don't bury the traps. The traps will be pushed down the hole as far as my arm can go when I am laying face flat on the ground. It will take six or seven attempts before I push them far enough without setting them off. By that time I am ready to dig up the whole garden by hand and strangle each gopher personally. My collection of traps. The big one is not for gophers: Renee

Vicky, Boy, we are much alike. Funny you should ask about sleeping schedule! I wrote my post right before going to bed a couple of nights ago. Went to bed -- then got up 2.5 hours later! I did get some more sleep later yesterday, and did some more catching up last night, so I think I'm back on schedule. I had a bout of insomnia for most of this year that was fairly resolved when we went on vacation. Anymore, I don't even consider one bad night of sleep per week as insomnia, compared to those long bouts. I've really been taken with alternative containers, especially since I can get them free while trash picking or keeping up with our local Freecycle Network. (People ask for or offer items that would otherwise simply be trashed, but still have some life in them. To find your area's site check out this link -- http://www.freecycle.org ) Granted, some times I do pay for the containers, but, if you know where to go (we just hit our local Goodwill Stores for the first time last week, looking for containers and found two -- a beatiful ceramic one for our small bay leaf and a cheapo plastic wagon that will only last a year or two), you can get the 5-6 gallon containers, for free or for $.50-$4 each. Below is the link to one page of one of my websites that gives a long list of unusual containers, and where you can find those 5-6 gallon containers, although I forgot to mention that my Dad gets his by buying kits to make wine, and gives many of them to me, afterwards. (I may not have kids, but I still enjoy playing and thinking young. LOL) Of course, once you get into containers, soil can get expensive. I've been buying much of my soil in the fall, when the leftover potting soil is on sale. I also supplement it with last year's dead annuals and the stuff that just blows into the yard -- leaves, buttonwood fuzz, and soil that leaches out of the bottom of containers, each time I water. (Last one is only doable if you have concrete for a yard, so you can tell the soil from the ground. LOL) My compost is left in five gallon containers with a multitude of holes on the bottom and lower sides, so the pill bugs can find it and enjoy making it into true compost during the winter. Add to that, I buy sandbox sand, which is more sterilized then builder's sand, a big bag of peat moss, and a couple of bags of perilite, to stretch out the bought potting soil more and mix it in with used soil and new compost. "Don't plant more then you can do," is my biggest problem! Eight years later, and I still can't figure out how much I can do. LOL Fortunately, I must be one of the world's worse seed sower, since only about a quarter of the seeds I start actually sprout AND grow to maturity. LOL (Yes, I use seed starte soil and containers, so it's not a problem with Damp Off.) This year, I'm even having trouble growing lettuce from seed! Last year, it grew quickly and easily. Well, good thing I read some good advice given to an advice columnist, when she brought home a whole pick-up truck full of annuals, and then realized how much time would be required to plant them all. She just sat in the midst of them, feeling overwhelmed, when her next door neighbor found her. The neighbor picked up a single container, handed it to her, and simply said, "plant one at a time!" Duh, now! LOL I guess that is part of the secret, realizing that we'll never get any of it done, unless we just set our minds to dealing with just one at a time! But, you are right. I do feel badly that hubby became disabled, but I'm sure glad I get to see more of him then I used to. I generally don't have to worry about dinner. He's a great cook and does most of it with great enjoyment and great results (as demonstrated by our great girths now, too. LOL) One thing I have learned in the last 8 years, that only other people in our situation truly understand -- the house will not fall down, if all the housework cannot be completed. LOL Sounds like something else we have in common -- a reduced sense of what absolutely has to be done for daily chores. ;) I sure hope your daughter can visit occasionally, so the two of you can sit in the garden and simply enjoy what you have so far! That's part of why I love gardening -- the amount of time hubby and I sit back there in the summer through September and just watch the tomatos fruit, the birds enjoying the bath and seeds, and the variety of herbs and flowers, as we just take it all in silently together. Lynn Here is a link that might be useful: Young Buds in the Garden

It depends on the rose and the problem. I've found that I can accommodate a rose that isn't the color I'd hoped, or isn't the size I'd hoped (although I do try to move them) and I'll try for years. I can't bring myself to remove a healthy rose. But a rose that clearly isn't going to be healthy for me? Early removal is better than later. Blackspot is here to stay, sadly, so severely affected roses need to go bye-bye. Roses that aren't tolerant to heat and humidity also can't stay. Neither are roses that, for no good reason, begin to commit suicide as soon as they cross the property line. I watch slow growers. I try moving them. I give them more than a year, a lot more if they're generally healthy. But if they can't do what they're supposed to do here, we need to part company. I have several that I received this year, still in pots, that will need to find a new home. One, a Biltmore rose that I thought would surely be at home here, has gone through several cycles of leaf loss due to blackspot. Another came to me with chlorosis and it hasn't improved much. I will give it a little more time and see if it can get better. A third seems to be entirely unhappy here, although I've tried moving it and even repotting it. It will improve for a time, but then lose its leaves and look pathetic again. Surprising to me, since it was hybridized in Tennessee. I have only so much time, space and energy to put toward roses so they need to be able to thrive here. If they can't do that, I figure that I shouldn't have them and they shouldn't be here. I haven't always felt this way, but over time, I've realized that saying yes to a sickly rose or one that will never thrive means saying no to a rose that would be happy and do well here.