DH hired a lawn service this year and I came home one day to find a "pesticide in use" sign in my yard. Grrrr. I wasn't happy. I have no idea what they used. I do plan on applying GrubX since I don't know what they used, it will be an expensive proposition, that's for sure (40k sf of lawn). I think I will get the traps and place them far away from the gardens, I can easily place them 100-300 feet from my house and still be on my own property. Since I can put them so far from the gardens, between me and the neighbor, so you think they might work? I have no intention of emptying the bags, I'll have DH do it! Do you think the defoliated roses will make it? One is the white knock-out, one is a David Austin and the other is an heirloom climber. The pink Knockouts are the current meal, I'll start drowning the little buggers tomorrow. As much as I hate the JB's, I hate the lily leaf beatles even more (I have no lilies because of them).

I have herbaceous peonies and they are now just roots with a few eyes. I was wondering why it is better to plant in a pot rather than in the garden. Maybe I'm all wrong about this but it seems I've read it a few times and I just wondered why?

If you already have your mind made up to either rototill or aerate, against the advice from the voices of experience, then here's what you're facing. Everyone knows that rototilling fluffs up the soil. The problem is that the tiller will bounce and buck up whenever it hits hard soil, rocks, or tree roots. The tiller will dig in whenever it hits soft or moist soil. What happens then is the underlying tilled soil profile is uneven from all the bucking and digging. When you level the soil at the surface the depth of fluffy soil varies according the the depth of the underlying profile. As the soil settles over the next three years, it will settle unevenly leaving you with a very bumpy surface to mow over. Usually people get really tired of alternately scalping spots in the yard as the holes and low spots form. That only takes a year and you'll have two more years of continued settling to look forward to. That is what you'll realize to be a problem. A secondary problem is when you rototill you bring up seeds that have been buried under the turf or soil. Once those see sunlight and get wet they will germinate. And a third problem is the soil biology is very stratified. Microbes needed to be on the surface will be buried and microbes needed to be buried an inch or two down will be on the surface. Reestablishing your soil biology will take several weeks. So the problems are that you destroy the soil structure and biology and bring in new weed seeds long forgotten. I would even argue that core aerating has a similar effect all around. It is less so, but the same issues cause the problems and the same problems result. There's never enough time to do it right, but there's always time to do it again.

Dax, I have to agree. when I was in Ohio (z 5B) I had the same experience as you. Here in zone 7, I could probably get away with planting in fall, but so far I've only planted bare root in spring, and fr containers up through early fall, which gives them enough time to root into the ground somewhat before dormancy. Example, I gave my father (in Canton, Ohio) two Metasequoia seedlings last October. They were one season old, having sprouted from seed in the spring of 2014, and were about 18 inches tall. When he planted them, they were in smart pots, (root pruning pots), and he told me the roots looked pretty good on both when removed from the pots. However, temps dropped to the teens there within a couple of weeks of planting, and never look back. Ohio had a very cold winter, and neither one broke dormancy this spring. Metas are definitely hardy in his part of Ohio, there are quite a few large ones around, and they are all still alive this spring. So it had to be the fall planting that did them in. I'm going to give him two more Metasequoias next week when I go visit, and I think as long as he keeps the well watered they should be okay, even though this not an ideal time to plant them. There also in smart pots, so we shouldn't have to do much if any "root surgery" to put them in the ground. I think as long as he waters them well, they should establish sufficiently by fall to survive the winter.