Denise, I did order 3 roses from Chamblees in 2011, Duchesse de Brabant, Mrs. B. R. Cant, and Crepuscule, and then last year I ordered 3 more from them--Pat Austin, SDLM, and Mrs. Dudley Cross. This coming fall I am thinking about ordering Maggie, and I might need to find 2 others to complete the order :) I was happy with Chamblees plants, although a couple plants were on the smaller side. But they did replace a small rose that arrived split at the soil surface. I planted the broken one, which is slowly catching up, as well as the replacement, so I have two Crepuscule plants. Rosefolly, my bigger Crepuscule that I planted next to an arbor needs some help. It doesn't seem to have grown much in the last year and is showing signs of what I think is an iron deficiency, green veins in pale leaves. Our calcareous soils make it difficult for plants to get the iron they need. It didn't help that a huge blue sky vine was taking over the arbor as well. Also, the plant is in the hot afternoon sun and I'm not sure that is the best location. The second, smaller Crepuscule is planted where it gets more shade and I'll be interested to see how it looks this fall. I am thinking about trying green sand for the iron problem, after reading about it this spring on one of the GW forums. As we are snow birds, I didn't have time to do any serious amendments this spring before we left for the north. I did fertilize with a fertlizer for acid loving plants and mulched. I will read more about green sand and perhaps try it in the fall. For now, my Florida roses are on their own (sorry to leave them--some were getting ready for a nice flush when we had to leave). I am hoping our area has a nice, rainy summer! Some photos--not many full bush photos--too much other greenery nearby makes them hard to photograph. Mrs. Dudley Cross has been slow to take off and has had just a couple of flowers on her thus far and they were not that nice. I'm hoping she'll improve with age. Marcia Duchesse de Brabant Crepuscule in 2012 Crepuscule bud in April 2013--you can see the darker veins in the lighter green leaves I love Pat Austen's color! Too bad her blooms droop so SDLM was a tiny plant when I received it last spring, so I took it back to PA with me and nursed it in a pot all summer. She was planted in the ground in November 2012. A helpful critter on one of her buds Mrs. B. R. Cant is definitely the plant that took off and grew larger than any of the others that I planted from Chamblees. Before we left Florida, we put a small fence (not in this photo) in front of her so the canes wouldn't droop on the ground and be run over by the lawn mower.

Has she gone through her flower bed to check on the leaf widths? The modern hybrids are hybridized from several species, not just H. Fulva. But I can't imagine that even H. Fulva is that agressive in one year (maybe five years, though). There are a lot of daylilies in the flowerbed in the picture, it seems like there would have been a more of a gradual takeover, and she would've noticed some of the fulva blooms in her garden. H. Fulva is a diploid. It's pollen wouldn't set good seed to a tetraploid. (If you're breeding for triploids, it's recommended to have a diploid seed parent and a tetraploid pollen parent). The differences in the color of the two pictures looks unrelated to the flowers. (the stem is blueish in one picture and yellowish in another). They don't seem to have any variation at all that would result from a possible cross with several other varieties. The whole flowerbed is the same. Unless there was a gradual takeover in the last five years, (I don't know your sister, but I don't think anyone in my family would notice something like that,) I would think also that they were taken. If there was a gradual takeover, there should be some unbloomed plants of the newer varieties. My suggestions is that she should look for differences in the length and width of the leaves.

Jo, It does sound promising. Actinovate is popular with organic gardeners and farmers and is available in all sizes suitable for everyone from home gardeners to commercial growers. When using it for a somewhat larger area it can be very costly, but if the alternative is to lose the struggle to nematodes every year, then of course it would be money well-spent. I think that Jay used Actinovate last year. Maybe when he returns from Wichita and has time to get online, he'll see this and tell you how he used Actinovate. He may have used it as a soil drench in his seedlings' containers, but I don't remember if he told me he used it that way or if I assumed that was how he was using it. I believe he was pleased with it. It is not surprising Actinovate outperformed Vapam. My Dad used Vapam long ago before it was removed from the home gardening market the first time and I was never convinced it was very effective anyway. Shortly after they took it off the market, he began moving towards a more holistic, chemical-free form of gardening that included composting, and his garden seemed to improve. The issue with all commercial soil fumigants is that they kill pretty much all the life in the soil....all those millions and millions of microbes per tablespoon of soil that healthy soil needs. Even if Vapam kills RKNs, it also kills any natural enemies of RNKs that exist in the soil and help keep them under control, including beneficial nematodes. So, for an organic grower, fumigants aren't even an option to begin with because they destroy every bit of good soil life/biological activity that organic growers are trying to achieve by using compost, manure, etc. Using Actinovate helps rebuild the soil life, so even if it wasn't helping with the RKN issue, it still would be improving your soil instead of stripping it of life. Let's hope they continue to update us on their research. When I was a kid and even later a young adult, the land grant universities like Texas A&M shunned organic research and focused only on chemical product research, and folks like Malcolm Beck and J. Howard Garrett had to do their own organic research and promote their own findings. The times have changed enough, finally, that we're seeing more land grant university research on organic methods espoused by some of the folks long active in the organic gardening movement. That's a really good thing. I've linked the article below. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Root Knot Nematode Research from Agri-Life

Jo, Like Larry, I've never seen any quantifiable independent research that shows neem oil applied to soil has any effect on nematodes, although I have seen such claims made by those who benefit from selling neem. I would never apply neem to soil because it likely would kill some of the good microbes in the soil which then would leave your soil less healthy. Remember that healthy soil is full of all kinds of biologically active creatures, which I tend to lump together in a group and call "microbes". What are these microbes and how many are there? The microorganisms include all sorts of microscopic plants and animals, including nematodes (there are beneficial ones, you know), fungi, actinomycetes, bacteria, yeast, germs, protozoa and algae. Healthy soil that has a good compost/humus content is believed to have as many as 50 billion microbes in 1 tablespoon of soil, according to organic gardening expert and author J. Howard Garrett, aka 'The Dirt Doctor'. Since all the microbes in soil play an important role in soil health, you don't want to put anything in the soil that would hurt those microbes. I'll use spider mites as an example of the unintended consequences of using a 'cide' to kill the bad pests and inadvertently killing beneficial insects too. While spider mites are a pest in certain circumstances, there are beneficial predatory mites that help keep the spider mites under control. When you spray a miticide on plants infested with spider mites, you kill not only some of the spider mites (most pesticides do not kill 100% of the pests) but also the predatory mites that help keep the number of spider mites down. When the mite population rebounds (and it always does), the pesky herbivore spider mites bounce back first because they feed on plants and plants are readily available so they have an endless food source. Then, in a much more slow manner, the predatory mite population, which are carnivores, rebounds. The problem is that beneficial insects rebound very slowly because the 'mamas' don't reproduce until there's already a good food source for their babies to eat. So, while the mama predatory mites are waiting for the food source to increase to the level they need, the spider mite population is growing very rapidly and getting out of control. Once the predatory mite population begins to surge and feed upon the spider mites, the spider mites have a huge head start and your plants are severely damaged. I think if you used neem in soil, you'd likely kill off a good portion of the microbes in the soil, leaving your soil less healthy, less fertile and more vulnerable to soil-borne pests, including root knot nematodes and various soil-borne diseases. So, even if the idea of trying neem is attractive, it could hurt more than it might help. I used the spider mite example to illustrate how using a 'cide' for pest control can backfire because it is the story of my life. My dad was a terrific gardener, but he fought spider mites my entire childhood, and he lost that battle in late July or so of every year, and so did his best gardening buddy, Mr. Camp. I watched the two of them try everything to kill those spider mites, but the spider mites always outlived and outlasted their efforts. So, I grew up thinking that no matter what you did, you would lose your tomato plants to spider mites in July. Eventually I grew up and had a home of my own and my own garden. During our second year in our house, we decided we wouldn't 'poison' our tomato plants with the miticide commonly sold to home gardeners back then. A miticide didn't help the first year in our new home when we did use it, so it seemed pointless to spend money buying it and then spend time spraying it on the plants the second year. What happened? Our spider mites didn't get out of control and our tomato plants didn't die. Once I convinced my dad to give up miticides, he never lost his tomato plants to spider mites again. Still, it probably was another dozen years or so before I finally understood why not using a miticide saved our plants from the mites, and that's because I didn't know back then that there was such a thing as predatory mites. So, I hope that tale illustrates the dangers of even attempting to use a soil treatment to kill the root knot nematodes. Even if it would kill the nematodes (which I highly doubt), it would kill all the other microbial life in the soil. As an organic gardener that is absolutely the last thing you need. Even worse, what I think most likely is the neem oil would kill the good microbes, but not the root knot nematodes. When I am trying to figure out what to use in my garden or landscape, I fall back on that old adage used by physicians.... "first, do no harm". You might have a chance of killing some of the root knot nematodes by applying beneficial nematodes to the soil. The most important factor affecting the efficacy of beneficial nematodes would be to apply them at precisely the exact temperature they need, and also to use the right beneficial nematodes. Dawn