Because a female Japanese Beetle can lay 40 eggs in her lifetime, if you let her and her twenty female egg mates from last year live, next year they can produce 800 JBs. Maybe some skunks will get some of them. Moles might wipe out ten or twenty, but every female that lives ...do the math. I may be the only person who has a good history with beetle traps. But when you say spraying is your only option, you are overlooking letting the trap catch them so that all you have to do is drown them. The beetles will find your roses regardless. And the pheromones they give off while one or two are on a rose will attract more beetles. That's why the beetle traps have two different lures. one pheromone and one flower. My part of the world has had horrific beetle infestations. We started putting up traps ten years ago. We had stopped the horrible multiplier effect that having a JB Target Plant flower garden can cause. We had gone from putting up ten traps to only putting up four. Then came three years of drought that finished the beetles off by encapsulating their larvae in hard clay. This year? I've decapitated three beetles. That's all I've seen and our first beetle date was June 6 or 7 for eight years. I will put a couple of bags out after tomorrow's rain, just in case any vagrants are around.

What I did was to cut off the diseased growth below the point on the cane that it appeared on. Any new growth from that cane has not shown any more symptoms with the exception of General Cavaignac. It was asymptomatic for a whole year but started showing it again. I cut it off and watered it with more aspirin, and it has been okay. I am suspecting a reinfection rather than a relapse because it is close to the infected Dr. Huey. I have used an aspirin spray. I have used one 325 mg pill per 3 gallons of water, the size of my tank sprayer. I do have to watch it carefully because I have seen foliage burn on some of the plants doing this. There is increased blackspot resistance from this treatment, but again foliage burn can be a risk. I have also been using the harpin material for good blackspot control, but it does not appear to have much influence, if any, over rosette. I think that early detection and treatment is a key help for this problem, like cancer. If it gets too far along, the plant will probably be lost. I am also wondering if an interferon-like material would be a good treatment option if it could be either sprayed or maybe watered into the ground. I hope these observations help this situation somehow.

I remember some of you folks, too. You should be able to click on that photo to go to my gallery of garden photos. Now that I'm retired, I'm gardening a lot and blogging about it (My Page links to it). Kelntx -- We have a favorite landscaper who does the difficult projects (fence, gate, water feature, big trees). He's currently building a gigantic deck around our newly installed swimming pool. We built the dry stream, the dining patio and all of the perennial/cottage/butterfly gardens. The gardens outside the fence in front of the house were planted last fall and this spring -- very new. Anne -- I hang out on the Cottage Garden Forum most of the time. I just got the garden certified as a Monarch Butterfly Waystation after learning about it from a friend over on that forum. We are also a certified NWF Backyard Habitat. My blog has a lot of info about it. Demifloyd -- I remember you and your great house! Another alumni! Katekouros -- I think I just responded on the kitchen thread that I'm moving photos out of Photobucket to Picasa. I'll try to get you some photos, but I hate to post an "old" house on the building forum! This drought reminded me of the dusty summer that our house was being finished, so I started thinking about folks here building in droughts or floods. Crazy weather. When you finally get beyond all that, get your landscaping in and start really LIVING in your home, you'll forget about the pain -- kind of like childbirth :-). We don't like to leave home anymore and I'll bet many of you will feel the same once you're settled into your dream homes. Take care, Cameron

Your kitchen is stunning! The things you still want to do will be great, but, honestly, it is quite beautiful as it is today.