The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife reports that castor oil does work to repel moles so if the proper amount is applied to the proper area and allowed to get down to where the moles feed, on the food they eat, it will be effective. Few of the commercial castor oil preparations have enough of the oil and they recommend too large an area for it to work. It would be just as effective on your 3 species of moles as on the primary 3 species in the east.

I grow roses organically and I live in the wet zone in the Puget Sound Area. When I first started buying roses I had a lot of trouble and visited the King and Pierce counties ARS sites as well as the ARS site from Olympia and checked out their links. I also got good suggestions from contacting them (the societies) and also checked out nurseries deemed "reputable" for selling roses that can do well here without a lot of work. Another thing that really helped was checking out books from the library. I was told that a lot of England has the same climate so didn't limit myself to books written for the US. Specifically, a Peter Beales (he is British and has been knighted-or whatever, for his work with roses) book called "Roses: an illustrated encyclopaedia and grower's handbook of species roses, old roses and modern roses, shrub roses and climbers" published by H. Holt, c1992. He has lots of books but this one is my favorite because he doesn't limit to just old roses and he has specific codes like (WW) if a rose hates wet weather . The book is somewhat old but unless I am after new hybrid teas it is helpful. Many of the new English roses do well here. My neighbors grow Heritage and Abraham Darby which are both somewhat cupped roses and they don't need to provide much care to them at all. There are some great OGR climbers some like Veilchenblau (purple) and Mme Alfred Carriere (white) are quite rampant growrers. Veilchenblau is a once blooming summer rose and Mme. is repeat blooming and even likes poor soil and shade. There are roses farms in both the wet side of Oregon and Washington. Many breed their own and others test breeds in their fields and only sell the successful ones. There is a site by an Olympia ARS member that charts roses successes and failures. It is: http://www.oysterbay.net/ourhouse/rosechart.html#chart Many of the people I have met in our local rose society don't seem interested in forums or even the internet and others are just too busy working and maintaining their gardens. I suspect that is why you have few responses. I certainly know of hundreds of people in the PNW who could be classified as rose lovers. You probably already have this but just in case http://www.ars.org/ If you are into old garden roses as I starting to be there is a group within the Seattle/King county society. Hope this helps.

@gardengal48: Please define "very much". Condit had said in his 1955 monograph that VdB grows and ripens 2 crops in the Portland area. Please see this link for Condit's monograph: http://ucanr.edu/datastoreFiles/391-296.pdf Using the GDD calculator from wunderground.com: Portland had approximately 1882 GDD hours (>50F) in year 2000. Seattle had about the same in 2010. Seattle had > 2700 GDD hours in 2016. Portland's has increased now to over 3000! If this isn't a substantial change, I dont know what is. Now, we should EASILY be able to ripen 2 crops of VdB in Seattle. And we do. As I did last year. Bob and I have had numerous discussions about this, including the increased GDD. Bob only grows figs for breba crop for reasons that I dont care to discuss on a public forum. He has seen my trees and I've seen his. We agree on what is possible and not possible. The articles you reference are unfortunately out of date and should not be used to dissuade people from growing great varieties of figs in the PNW.

"The difference between the Pacific Northwest and the Atlantic Northeast is that the waters off the Atlantic are warmer, since the ocean currents are moving northward, clockwise from the Gulf of Mexico." This is demonstrably not true in winter. It was a hassle to go find to buoy data - but then reading data from obscenely formatted flat files is part of what I do for a living - and comparing a buoy a similar distance off Massachusetts and Port Orford, OR, the Oregon buoy is about 2C warmer in January. As would be expected. In the very coldest winters ever, the Atlantic coast has frozen as far south as Virginia Beach, VA! Pray tell if you've known of that happened at remotely similar latitudes along the Pacific coast! "This paradoxically leads to colder winters, because the rising warm air off the ocean leads to storm systems that can pull in air from further north" Eh, no. The periodic incursions of very cold air into the northeastern USA actually have more to do with conditions in the Pacific, which is why their frequency is influenced by the ENSO. Their overall capriciousness is influenced by the lack of geographic factors that keep winters in Eastern Asia so generally stable by creating a semi-permanent Siberian high. You will never hear of Beijing getting 2 ft. of snow in a 'northeaster', (東北風暴 LOL) and cities in inland China at the same latitude and elevation of Atlanta have winters that are USDA zone 9b or 10a instead of 7b or 8a. As Atlanta would if it were not for those periodic cold outbreaks that plague most of the CONUS to varying degrees. (no pun intended!) The ocean current from the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf Stream and mostly turns away from the US around North Carolina. Northeast coast is just about as influenced by cold Labrador current. Not that it matters, anyhow...even if the Gulf Stream headed straight for Maine, it isn't as though the climate of Boston would magically become like Sydney, or even Seattle. Unless we remove most of Canada from the face of the Earth and convert it into an ocean LOL. The main difference between climate of the US PNW and northeast is explained by their relative positions on a continent of a planet where mid-latitude winds are westerly - the same factor explaining the differences between western Europe and Siberia, as well as differences between more benign climates like Perth and Sydney, and Cape Town and Durban.