Sounds like a good plan to me Kat. Most Ao do go dormant in the winter but some specimens for some reason do not. As long as the plant has leaves I would continue to water, just not as much as summer. When/if they loose their leaves I stop. Make sure to give your Ao lots of water and fertilizer in the summer, the common name of "desert rose" is misleading. They love water when its hot.

I think its fungal too, however there is no white stuff on the bottom of the leaf. Unfortunately, its spreading. RIGHT when the first two female flowers have appeared. I've been spraying with Ortho Disease Control with little effectiveness.

Bt 'kurstaki' is the best organic remedy I have found for any and all kinds of caterpillers, except maybe for cutworms and other caterpillars that spend some time underground as a part of their life cycle or their daily life. (With those, I've found Slug-Go Plus very effective.) If a product with Bt 'kurstaki' is not effective for you, you can step up to one of the other organic pesticides containing pyrethrin or spinosad. The problem with those two pesticides is that they will kill a lot of other insects, including your beneficial insects that help keep your pest insects under control. For that reason, I never spray them on my entire garden, although I might spray them directly on a specific plant or two that has a major insect problem. With any pest, I always start with the least invasive form of control, like hand-picking, and then step up to a narrow-spectrum pesticide that only affects the pest (like Bt 'kurstaki', for example). If the situation cannot be controlled with those, a person can use organic pesticides that cover a wider spectrum of pests, but I don't like using those because I depend a great deal on my beneficial insects to control my garden's pest insects. I try to garden for the butterflies and plant oodles of plants for them, not just for adult butterflies but also to nourish the caterpillars, so it is a rare occasion that I'll use Bt 'kurstaki' at all, and when I do, I use it only on the specific plants (usually broccoli and cabbage plants) that are being damaged and am extremely careful not to let it drift on to nearby butterfly flowers. One problem with loopers is that they do like lots of other plants and will devour those too. That includes spinach, lettuce and other leafy greens, potato and tomato plants, and cucumber plants. (I mean regular cucumber---I'm not sure I've ever seen them on Armenian cucumbers, but those are really melons and not cukes.) I try to control cabbage loopers and imported cabbage worms by handpicking them every day and dropping them into a bowl of soapy water to drown. I used to take them and throw them to the chickens, but our chickens are either lazy or too well-fed, because when I toss caterpillars in their chicken run, they mostly look up at me with an expression that says "I am not gonna eat that" and then they walk away and I have to go into the chicken run and kill the loopers myself----so I save myself the trouble of trying to feed them to the chickens by drowning them. Then, I dump the dead loopers onto the compost pile where they can decompose into compost that someday will feed my garden plants. If hand-picking them is not an option and you'd rather not spray pesticides in the garden, your next best bet is to buy trichogramma wasps and release them in your garden. This is a good option only if you do not spray pesticides in your garden. There's not point in releasing beneficial insects if you're going to turn around and kill them. There are many other kinds of loopers, so it could be you have one of those and not that cabbage loopers. I'm pretty sure the loopers I have found devouring my cleome plants were cabbage loopers, but it could be they are just some other looper than looks similar. One of my favorite early-season ways to control them actually involves controlling the moths. When I first start seeing their moths, which in recent years has been in March or even in February, I put a few yellow Tidy Cat litter buckets filled with alfalfa tea in the garden and also near any lights that remain on all night long. You make alfalfa tea the same way you make compost tea only by soaking some alfalfa (instead of compost), like rabbit feed pellets made of compressed alfalfa, for example, in water for a few hours. Those moths flock to those buckets of alfalfa tea (and so do the June bugs which normally are April bugs here), and I have a lot of dead looper moths floating on the surface of the alfalfa tea every morning. I scoop them out so their dead bodies won't be some sort of warning to other looper moths, and have more floating in there the next day. This is not something I use long-term. I just use it for a few days when the moths first appear. If I leave it out later on as the weather warms up more, I tend to find bees and other beneficials in there, which just horrifies me. Then, I call it a year and pour the alfalfa tea on some plants that need a good feeding. Keeping tall grass mowed short helps keep the hopper population down right now. I try to keep the grass outside the garden mowed pretty short, but there's nothing I can do about adjacent pastures that do not belong to us. Later on, in July and August when huge hordes of hoppers migrate into the still-green areas from dried out pastures and grasslands, mowing isn't that effective. Grasshoppers are so mobile that no matter what you do, more just keep moving in. I got a huge education in grasshopper behavior and grasshopper control our first few years here when we had drought and the population was huge. Grasshopper control is difficult at best, but most easily done when they are young and small. Once they are big, you're only going to have luck with vacuuming them up. Been there. Done that. Hate doing it. I hate grasshoppers more, though.

Neem but a weak dosage this time of the year...If you have blooms you will loose them. If you want to try a chemical I have used Bayer Tree and Shrub spray or the one for Roses and that usually knocks them dead. If you choose to use Neem, do as Laura said and I even go a step further, I make a soapy water and then rinse the tree off with it after an hour or two to wash some of the oils off the leaves once the bugs have been suffocated..