I didn't think there was any 'common view' of applying Round Up to anything. It doesn't garner shelf space in our garage or shed because it's designed to kill stuff.

Just because one doof uses Round Up in his rose garden doesn't mean that the generalization should be extrapolated to everyone. I started to watch that link, but it apparently goes on for 10 minutes; that's about 9 mintues and 50 seconds too much of some random guy I don't know who decided to publicly demonstrate his laziness.

There will always be people who try to take the easy way out of hard work. Look at that rose bed--I'd be embarassed to have weeds that thick. What does this guy do, garden once every blue moon?

I can't imagine spraying herbicide in this manner in any garden. Do people do this?

I did watch a good amount of the video. At some point he lifts up the branches of a rose, sprays underneath and drops them back down. Seems, uh.. unwise?

The guy in the video is not so random: http://www.growquest.com/

Have you googled growquest?

When I was first looking for a citrus tree I had seen their website...yikes

Yep. I check in to the ongoing growquest threads here and there every so often just to see if it is still in business.

Regarding his choice not to use rubber/plastic gloves, the following is from a research paper with a Monsanto coauthor.

"For farmers, the use of rubber gloves when mixing
and loading pesticides or when repairing
equipment was associated with measurably
reduced urinary concentrations."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1241861/pdf/ehp0112-000321.pdf

------------------------------------------
I added a Baldo Villegas web page to my links on what herbicide damage of roses looks like.

"Many gardeners use Round Up herbicide around the rose beds, too close to the roses. This is what happens to the roses. In some of these cases the application occurred during the winter months when there is no foliage but as the roses leaf out, the distinctive damaged foliage shows up."
AND
"This is a recent example of a summer application of a combination of pesticides at a local public garden. Many of the roses in the rose beds were severely affected. The damage lasted for several months."

------------------------------------
My modified web page:

http://home.roadrunner.com/~kuska/rose_rosette_disease_virus.htm

http://buggyrose.tripod.com/iabioticdisorders.htm

Here is a link that might be useful: link for Glyphosate biomonitoring for farm families above

I wouldn't ever consider spraying round-up within 100 feet of any rose on my property. For me weeding is by hand or by hoe.

ditto what harmonyp and flaurabunda said, no RU is used here. I use fabric and mulch well and weeds are therefore easily pulled by hand. Even if they get past the seedling stage, they never put down deep roots. The beds in the Central West End/at my workplace that I spoke of in the last post about RRD are also fabricked and weeded and mulched by hand by the groundskeepers. I know because I have watched them when they care for the beds in spring--a whole group of them is out trimming, clearing debris, pulling weeds and mulching. So RU doesn't have relevance to the contexts in which I post about RRD.

no No NO! Never, ever use Round-Up anywhere near the roses. Unless you like them to LOOK like the have RRD!

There is no local rose club in my city, so I joined the local garden club several years ago, figuring it was better than nothing. However, I quit going when a number of the women at the meeting all joined in singing unanimously the praises of Round-up as the gardener's indispensible weeding tool.

"How can anyone garden without using Round-up for the weeds," more than one "gardener" cooed and raved.

I was about having a heart attack! Wondered if it was me being an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy, or if there was something wrong with their gardening principles. I finally decided it was the latter problem.

: )

Kate

I should have better things to do with my time, but I reflected back on this thread. Does anyone else find it strange that a person who is supposed to have a doctorate in something scientific would post this question?

Why was this question posted anyways?

I posted the question to see if my views of this link are similar to the rose growers who frequent this forum. (I was surprised to see how "mild" most of the comments were at the bottom of the link that I gave - there were only 2 dislikes-see right side of original link.)

I use RU and sometimes around my roses. I don't use a small wide sprayer as this person did. I use a long (sometime extended) wand so I can stand a good bit away from where I'm spraying and get into tight spots. And the spray should be very narrow, unless you are spraying a whole patch of weeds. The way he sprayed the sidewalk crack, he wasted so much on the concrete. The weeds are in the crack, not on top of the cement!

Sometimes you need RU. I had to spray around some roses to get rid of invasive vinica and trumpet vine. You can't dig that stuff up. I was very careful and the roses haven't show any sign of RU damage. The trumpet vine is gone (for now), the vinica needs another shot.

Bet, if you manage to kill off your vinca, please let me know! Mine laughs at RU, I've taken to pulling by hand!

I have had to use RU on occasion also, although never in or near my rose beds. When I cleared the wooded area at the edge of our property of several shrub honeysuckle I dug as much up as I could but had to supplement cutting/digging with some RU so that I could actually weaken the plant enough to come back several weeks later and get the stump/roots out. Same thing for several RRD infected multiflora climbing up into the trees in the neighbor's woods and one RRD infected New Dawn planted along our wall--they were giant diseased plants with deep roots, and it took repeated digging and hacking and finally a round of RU on what was left (that kept coming back) before I could get them tamed enough to remove. I prefer to trim the invasive species back to a small leafy stump that can be tied up in a garden or shopping bag and sprayed with RU inside the bag in a controlled, localized way, to get it there without touching anything else.

Diane, I'm trying the special Woody Vine RU that can also kill poison oak/ivy. Which I found I have the hard way :( I think it did ok on the first pass, but the vinica needs another shot. The vinica was planted by my neighbor and has grown over 10 feet into my yard.

I did sympathize with that guy. Bermuda and spurge are very difficult to get rid of. I have bermuda growing underneath a 2 ft wide sidewalk into a front rose bed. I also have mondo grass and other companion plants in this bed, so I can't use RU. It've tried digging it up 3-4 times. On the advice of Connie (Hartwood Roses) I used grass be gone. It did a great job and did not harm the roses or other plants. I haven't seen any bermuda this year. The spurge will probably show up later this year.

that's interesting, here people plant vinca as ground cover (pretty purple flowers), but I guess it gets more invasive as you go south.

I guess the stores here also sell trumpet vine, and that becomes a complete mess if untended. My neighbors have some that has scaled their older pines (30-40 feet upward easily) and occasionally tries to break through the fabric of my lot line beds and invade here. They also put in bamboo at some point, and that is a living wall, never to be removed, although fortunately far from my property line.

I don't use roundup...well except this year on some zapote trees that we have been trying to kill for several years. They were cut down 5+ years ago, I have covered in black plastic, cut the roots I could find, cut off suckers...the beasts refuse to die. I am on my second bottle of round up, they are still trying to come back.

On regular weeds, that is what my shovel and hoe are for.

For what it is worth: There are other toxins to kill weeds, stumps and other undesirables than RoundUp.

I have used RoundUp in very safe areas and found that other brands or types of killers work far better.

Around roses when I do use one, I put a few drops on weeds that are extremely annoying. I do NOT simply spray, ever, around my roses, or Iris, or Peonies.
If a weed spread by rhizomes, dig down and paint the roots and rhizomes with systemic killer.

I learned a hard lesson about Round up. Our neighbor planted mint next to the fence near my rose garden. They never eat it. Over the last couple years I've done a lot of pulling, cutting, etc. This year I decided to just paint a little roundup on the mint about 3 feet away from my roses. Big mistake. It went into the soil and three of my roses began displaying the freaky martian blooms. Since our roses were on the annual rose tour within a few weeks I knew rose people would know what "Miss Organic" had done. I took out all three roses (and the soil) and replaced them with new ones-non blooming for the tour of course. One drop of roundup is one drop too much.

If you want the lowdown on this guy check out Growquest on Garden Watchdog. Yikes!

Deanna

I wonder why he used such a small handpressure sprayer - considering how much easier it would have been to have a cropduster plane make a few "rounds up" and - down the street??

Scary - reading The Garden Watchdog about this guy and GrowQuest - Unbelievable!

Well, I guess I'm one of those freaks that loves RU!! I use it all the time, and go thru' lots of bottles of the stuff... it comes in the spray bottle where you squeeze the trigger and it sometimes sprays where you aim... I use it periodically along my walkway, along the edge of the street, all along my paver walkways around the house, and in the back-yard and alley where the weeds grow and I can't get to.... but never anywhere near my roses.... and please don't tell me I should be doing this-or-that, I have a bad back and wear a brace, and have both RA and regular arthritis and cannot bend much so save my bending for working in my rose-beds, also age has caught up.... so that's my confession, I'm a fan of RU..it works, and saves a lot of work on my part...sally

I dunno how common this approach is, frankly. I have sprayed weeds in rose beds before but never like this!!! with such closely planted roses and just lifting up branches. Nope, only where there's lots of space between the roses, and use a garbage can lid between the spray and the rose, never directly under any part of the rose where the rose will touch it after you remove the garbage can lid, and never with one of those little quart sized sprayers that make you bend over all the time.

My local rose society uses huge amounts of pre-emergent herbicides in the rose garden but not Roundup or any other post emergents.

He is right about a couple things, if you get roundup on the rose just cut it off right away; and if a weed is tall and full grown like the grasses he shows, just pull them out don't bother spraying them. And the dye is a good idea, we do that at work so we can see where we've hit and where we've missed.

But otherwise yikes! it's all over his hands - another good reason to use dye, you can be pretty surprised at where your herbicide shows up. Always always ALWAYS wear gloves with any kind of pesticide. and what a noisy neighborhood. I'd go nuts.