I pulled on my chest waders and went into the pond to clean off my lilypads and blossoms. Tons of aphids! Who knew the little guys could swim...shortly after washing them off, they swam, or floated right back on! I pulled out the damaged or dead leaves, and will spray them with the hose a couple of times a day. My mosquito fish will eat them, but they can't keep up. My big fish ignore the bugs. By the way , the reason I use waders is because I have "Backswimmers" living in my pond. Those are bad bugs; they have a bite like a yellowjacket. Imagine an amphibian attack group that checks out everything entering the pond. Scary, and the only way to get rid of them is scim them up and smash them.

buy some live traps from your local hardware store, visit farmers market or your friends and ask where is the best place to deliver your furry friends after you trap them. you need to go at least 20 miles from your home or they will make it back. to get rid of our ground-hog infestation under the porch we resorted to some drastic measures. put some lye around and down their little holes to chase them out. have not seen any since

I found this link that might help: Posted by gardenguru1950 SunsetZ16 (My Page) on Sat, Aug 8, 09 at 13:06 The most common "eater" of rose leaves in California is the Bristly Rose Slug, the larvae of the Rose Sawfly. The sawfly is a pudgy little wasp. It lays its eggs on the UNDERSIDES of the leaves and the caterpillars feed on the UNDERSIDES of the leaves. The rose slug is tiny, no more than 1/4-inch long and very slender, and it's the exact same pale green as the undersides of the leaves. Talk about hard to see and find! It's the critter that "skelotinizes" rose leaves. It's pretty easy to get rid of, actually. Almost any good spray will do the job: insecticidal soap, Neem, pyrethrum. The trick is to spray thoroughly UNDER the leaves. Not stand back and spray all over. You have to get UNDER the leaves. By the way, a commonly suggested spray for rose sawfly is BT. It doesn't work. It doesn't work because it's meant for the caterpillars of moths and butterflies. The rose slug is the larvae of a wasp. And I'm not sure of any beneficial insect that preys upon it. As for your rose buds, Applenut has a good idea. Go outside late at night with a flashlight. The critter most likely is an earwig, sowbug or pillbug. It also might be a slug or snail. Joe Here is a link that might be useful: Bugs that eat roses' leaves

It probably was an entertaining sight, but Yellow Cat and a couple of chickens are the only witnesses and they have been sworn to secrecy. I totally agree that the weather has made us feel all shut-in and unable to work outside just as if it was winter. I hate it. We've cleaned out the garage, which includes a big workshop area and a big storage area. We've been cleaning out closets and cabinets. Today I'm cleaning out the walk-in pantry. One day this week I'm going to tackle the closet in the master bedroom and the linen closet. All those things needed to be done, but we're only spending time doing them at this time of the year because we cannot do anything outdoors. I hateit. I've been resisting the urge to put any replacement plants in the ground as well, and it is so hard. On the removal of fruit and blossoms, I understand why you're doing it. However, if you're talking about tomato plants and sweet pepper plants, I would be conservative about how many I removed. My fear is that we'll be cool and rainy and then, BAM, one day it all stops and we instantly become hot and dry. Were that to happen, it might suddenly be too hot for blossoms on tomato plants to set fruit at all (except for bite-sized types and most paste types), and even sweet peppers can set poorly once the daytime highs are in the 90s, though hot peppers don't miss a beat until it is well over 100 degrees. It depends though. If removing the fruit and blossoms seems like the only option that might help the plants bounce back, then of course, you have to do it. My main experience with waterlogged tomato plants was in 2009, when we got about 15" of rain in April (almost 13" in one day) and then got probably another 6 or 7" in the next 4 to 6 weeks. The tomato plants had been pretty happy and healthy, and even in the raised beds, they took a severe nosedive away from happy and healthy to sad and suffering. The plants stopped growing, their foliage discolored because water-clogged roots couldn't take up nutrients from the soil, etc. It probably was at least 2 solid months before I was sure the plants would recover. Eventually they produced ripe fruit and all, but it was a nerve-wracking couple of months. Pepper plants were a little more resilient, surprisingly, but the harvest still was late. I believe that back in our other flood year, 2007, it was more of a prolonged rainy spell for months and months and the plants stunted, stalled, looked horrific.....and eventually survived and gave a much smaller than average harvest. I know that I foliar fed them weekly trying to get them back into good health, trying to gently spray the water-soluable fertilizers only on the leaves lightly and slowly so it wouldn't drip off onto the ground. I alternated liquid seaweed, liquid fish (ban all cats from the garden if you do this, or they'll almost kill your plants as they frantically search for the fish they smell), Garrett Juice and Miracle Grow, trying anything and everything that I could do to help the plants survive. In 2004, I don't think we were as wet overall, but we had a huge amount of rainfall in May and in June---over 12" at our house in June alone, and the fruit were huge, and the flavor was totally watered down. Fruit cracked and split but a lot of the cracks healed. It wasn't the best harvest in June and July, but the plants hung in there and rain stopped in early July, and we had great-tasting fruit by August. So, while the early fruit that had set in spring suffered, the fruit that managed to set during the rainy spell in May and June produced a great late summer and early fall harvest. I remember it well as friends were visiting from out-of-state and we were getting amazing tomato harvests for August, and they fell in love with heirloom tomatoes while visiting us that month. Nebraska Wedding, in particular, produced stunningly beautiful and tasty tomatoes, salvaging what had been a fairly lackluster tomato season thus far. I also had foliar fed that year, trying to nurse the plants along and help them survive. For me, the key is whether the foliage looks good or bad, and whether the plants continue to grow any at all. If the foliage is a halfway normal green, I try to leave the plants alone and let them overcome the wet soil on their own if they can. If there is a lot of yellowing and purpling, I try to foliar feed to correct the deficiencies. If there is wilting, I do everything I can to help dry out the soil---raking back the mulch, punching holes in the ground around the plant with a piece of rebar to aerate the soil, etc. When the plants wilt as a result of waterlogged roots, that is a desperate sign of how hard they are struggling to survive. If the wilting doesn't go away fairly quickly, the plants rarely bounce back well. A few times I have taken a shovel and cut a circle in the soil around the plant as an attempt at aeration. I've even lifted plants up on top of the soil and let them sit there and dry out a day or two before plopping them back into the ground. If they seem like they're about to die from waterlogging, then it doesn't hurt to take drastic measures to save them. One year, and I think it was 2009, I had tomato plants that weren't even in the ground yet, and I didn't want to put them there, but I needed to either plant them or toss them on the compost pile. So, we went to Lowe's and I searched the aisles for a solution that would not require me to build a new raised bed. I had a raised bed ready and waiting, but it had water standing on top of its soil, so it just was too wet. Adding more lumber and a whole lot more soil to raise the raised bed even taller would have been expensive and probably overkill. On the concrete aisle, I found those round cardboard tubes you use to pour concrete to make piers or footings or something. We bought several and brought them home. Tim cut them into 12" sections for me. I set them down on top of the raised beds, filled them with a purchased soil-less mix, and planting the remaining tomato plants inside those cardboard tubes. The tubes were bottomless, so the roots could grow right down into the raised bed's soil as the season went on, but enough of the roots were above the soil level that continued pesky rainfall didn't harm them. Those tube-planted plants gave me the best harvests that year and were healthier than all the plants that already were in the ground when all that rain fell. Speaking of the compost pile, a while back I threw some leftover tomato and pepper plants onto the pile, keeping 10 backup tomato plants in containers in the greenhouse and 6 or 8 pepper plants. I wanted to keep them all, but didn't want to have oodles of leftover plants to tend during the non-stop wet spell. Guess what became of those plants? Did the deer and bunnies who visit the pile a dozen times a day eat them? Nope. Those plants are growing and look just as good as the tomato and pepper plants growing in my garden, albeit smaller. I have a whole back garden, roughly 3000 square feet that isn't planted, can't be planted due to water standing in it, and has weeds head high, along with some perennial herbs and flowers. I've about given up getting in planted. I left the gate open one night, and a rabbit built a nest and had her babies in there. She's on the highest point of the land, and I closed the gate back so our cats and dogs cannot get in there and get her babies, but I cannot let her live in there forever. Maybe I'll eventually get to plant back there but it might not happen until June. Rain is in our forecast every day, so I don't really see things getting better anytime soon. We have puddles that have stood on the ground in our yard for so long that pond scum is growing on top of the water. The pastures are even worse. This is probably a good year to focus more on container gardening, and I have done some of that, but most of my containers were filled before rain started falling, and I hate to keep buying more and more containers and the soil-less mix to fill them, when maybe the ground will just dry out eventually.