Congratulations, and I hope Spring is all that you anticipate. Here it truly has not rained for 13 months, and now they tell us it probably will not rain at all for another 9 months, so I am hunkering down making plans to try and just keep the roses I already have alive through our hot, always dry summer. Not pruning, mulching everything deeply. Watering a bit for now (as normally we get about 40 inches of rain every winter, but so far have .85 inches with none in sight), but they say we will be on serious rationing as of April 1 (they are not doing it before then because one year they started rationing on Feb 1, and it really did rain hard every single day that Feb, and the water utility offices flooded, and they looked like fools). My DH has figured out how to put a huge water tank in our ground floor basement right under the bath/shower in the floor above, which will catch all of our shower water. Then he will connect a long hose to the tank so that I can water the most vulnerable plants enough to hopefully keep them alive. I have planted a lot of South African bulbs and plants in the last few years, but even they are used to wet winters. They go dormant in the summer, which is good. So, not looking forward with pleasure, but I am very glad someone is! Jackie

Jane, I tried the All-in-One drench before I used the Bayer Advanced Disease Control formula--they're the same active ingredient for the blackspot; that being tebuconozole. Look at Lowe's stores for it. I haven't found it anywhere else. Anyway, my roses are potted, which ends up leading to extra concentration of the chemicals in the root zone. I ended up chemical burning my plants. I cut back the concentration to 1/3 the stated directions, and that seemed to work, but it still killed good bugs, and kept me from being able to apply the specific fertilizers that I preferred, because it already fertilized the plants. The things that really convinced me to switch were the cost--since the all-in-one uses much more product per plant, and the fact that all that insecticide is just way too toxic for my yard and the environment in general. I do use insecticides (Bayere Insect Killer), But only as spot treatment. Around here, I've found the only things I feel I need it for are thrips. I just spritz individul buds just before they lower their sepals, and that seems to minimize the thrips damage enough. I don't even spray for spider mites, which can kill plants around here. For that, I just thoroughly hose the plants' leaves with a strong blast of water every 2 to 3 days in hot weather. That seems to disrupt their reproductive cycle enough to keep the damage to a minimum. As for Aphids, they are the staple diet for a lot of good bugs, and it takes an awful lot of them to do any real damage. So I do like those above have said. Fingers or blasts with water. Caterpillers and June bugs can be bad here, but handpicking seems to do the best for me. Thankfully the June bugs are only around about a month. The caterpillers are easy to find by their trail of chewed up leaves. Also, by hunting for caterpillars, I can discriminate. I don't like killing butterfly caterpillars. I've done a little online entemology research to learn what is what, so when I find a butterfly caterpillar--as opposed to moths, I generally carry it away from the rose area and put it on some butterfly bush or four-0-clocks or some other plant it should like better than the roses. I accidentally discovered that parsley plants are like magnets for Monarch caterpillars. Boy do they love parsley! I never knew that much bout bugs before growing roses, but it seems to be a lot more fun learning about them when I don't kill them all. I prefer to kill just the ones I don't like. : ) Mike

You have more guts than I do putting that thing in the ground at that size. Those are older yellowing leaves and the newer leaf looks decent. It could be the plant is recycling the older ones in order to put out a flush of new growth (read an inch or so). If the newer leaf looked like the older ones, I would tell you to call your local exorcist. You might take a stick and poke it into the ground around the plant, but far enough away not to damage its roots, then smell the stick to make sure the soil smells like "soil" and not like a soured pot which has stopped draining. Make it something long enough to push into the soil a foot or a bit more, so you can determine if the drainage is decent or not. As long as it smells as you'd expect, that isn't an issue. If it stinks, smells bad, as if it's soured, you have too much organic material in the ground for the amount of water being held. In that case, you want to gently move the plant from there ASAP and put it in a pot of the potting soil of your choice. IF you feed it anything, I would make it inorganic, like a Miracle Gro All Purpose water soluble at half strength. Instead of the table spoon per gallon, I would use half a table spoon per gallon and use what seems appropriate for the level of drainage you have. If I suggest half a gallon and your drainage is too slow, you could ruin your progress. Remember, you can always add more. You can't remove any already applied. Then, just light candles, say your prayers, pay the preacher and keep those weeds back from the rose to eliminate competition and shading. Good luck. You will need it. I have two budded Grey Pearl plants (you can never call this a "bush" as it never is) I have nursed for far too many years. I seldom let them flower to push them to hold as much growth as possible. A couple of times a year they appear on the verge of committing suicide. I then go into emergency mode with more food, more water, more threats and screaming and they slightly rebound. Both are in ground to avoid the soil overheating in my climate and exposure. One of these days, I will deliberately push them over the edge in a kill or cure (hopefully kill, I need the space for GOOD plants) when they start holding the knives to their wrists.... Kim

It is a nice list, but I have companion planted forever and want to stress that it is far from a proven science. In fact, in multiple university studies, the companion planting claims do not hold up in controlled studies done to study their efficacy. I am at the point that I ignore all those comments about "improves growth or flavor" and I ignore 98% of the comments about any type of plant repelling specific pests. Very few of those supposed benefits have been observed in my garden, and I've been companion planting in this location ever since we moved here in 1999. The reason to companion plant is to attract beneficial insects, and that's why I do it. Here's one example from what I've learned over the years: I can surround my cabbage beds, for example, with a solid border of all the companion plants said to repel cabbage worms, and my cabbage plants (and all other brassicas susceptible to the same pests) will be totally devoured by cabbage worms anyway. Often, those cabbage worms are sitting so close to the plants that supposedly repel them that they can use the companion plants to travel from one cabbage plant to another. So, take those sorts of recommendations with a grain of salt and just save yourself the hassle by growing your brassicas underneath row covers or insect netting placed over low tunnel hoops. It is the single most effective thing I've done in my garden in terms of deterring all types of brassica type caterpillar pests from devouring brassica plants. It is a gazillion times easier and more efficient/productive that devoting garden space to companion plants that don't repel the pests anyway, and it is preferable to using Bt 'kurstaki' in the garden, since the Bt can harm desirable butterflies. In the back garden I felt like I had some success with common wormwood repelling some but not all caterpillars from brassicas, but common wormwood is a garden thug that gets huge and reseeds readily. Fortunately for me, I believe the flooding of 2015 killed all my wormwood. I don't intend to replant it, and live in fear of it spontaneously making a comeback from self-sown seed and taking over the whole back garden again. There are some things that do seem to work. For example, growing horseradish (preferably in pots since it is invasive) does seem to help (though not 100%) keep Colorado Potato Bugs off your potato plants. But, guess what? If the CPBs show up and are repelled from the potato plants by nearby horseradish, guess where the CPBS will go? Straight to the tomato plants. So, remember you also can see some unintended consequences. I find hand-picking and drowning the CPBs as soon as they show up to be the best way to manage them. It is important to find them the first day they show up, before they can breed and lay eggs. Growing basil with tomatoes seems to help repel hornworms, but you'll see an occasional hornworm on a plant anyway. I feel like four o'clocks planted as a heavy border along two sides of the garden also repel hornworms. Otherwise, there's no real explanation for how I can grow hundreds of tomato plants each year and almost never see more than 1 to 6 hornworms the entire growing season. The area where companion plants shine is in the way they attract beneficial insects, which serve multiple purposes in your garden. This is how I use companion plants nowadays, after determining that their other reported benefits are hard to see, hard to prove and harder and harder to believe. For attracting beneficials, you need a wide range of companion plants, and the most important is to have something that is green and, hopefully, in bloom virtually year-round. Diversity is important so instead of growing tons and tons of each companion plant, I grow a few of many, many different plants. The most useful plants for attracting a wide range of beneficials are those that have small flowers or large flowerheads composed of many small flowers (like yarrow, tansy, sweet alyssum, etc.) and daisy type flowers. I feel like the flowers/herbs that attract the most beneficial insects to our garden are these: sweet alyssum, dill, fennel, yarrow, statice, purple poppy mallow, petunias (especially Laura Bush petunias with their heat tolrance), feverfew, nicotiana, small flowered marigolds like lemon gem, tangerine gem, and red gem, cilantro/coriander (you have to leave it and let it bloom in order to attract the beneficials so you don't harvest this cilantro as cilantro but you can harvest the seeds for coriander), parsley, tansy, silver tansy, comfrey, zinnias, cosmos, buckwheat, spike speedwell, nasturtiums, and moss rose. Many other herbs will attract beneficial insects once they flower, and this includes catnip, catmint, lemon balm, sage, basil, mints (in pots only as they are incredibly invasive), borage, and wormwood. The beneficial insects that I most want to attract to my garden, in addition to bees of all kinds, are green lacewings, brown lacewings, hover flies, lady bugs, minute pirate bugs, big-eyed bugs, and all the little parasitic wasps like brachonid wasps, ichneumoid waspas, and trichogrammas wasps. The plants I listed above do attract them and I think the beneficial wasps, in specific, are why I don't have a lot of caterpillars anyway, notwithstanding the annual onslaught of cabbage worms. I believe the beneficial wasps eventually, in due time, would control the cabbage worms, but before that could happen, you'd have holey plants, so I just exclude them from the plants in the first place. You don't have to run out and buy tons of packets of flower and herb seeds. Many seed companies sell pollinator blends and good bug blends that attract bees and other pollinators as well as the beneficial insects I listed above. You can buy as little as one seed packet of pollinator or good bug attracting plants, or you can buy the mixes by the quarter pound or pound. I have used seed mixes like these from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply, Wildseed Farms and Botanical Interests, among others. Because many of the plants that attract pollinators are large, getting quite tall and spreading out wide, the easiest way to grow them is as border plants along the edges of your garden. You can choose smaller, more compact companion plants to grow in the same beds as your garden plants, but understand that even these can take up a lot of space if you aren't careful. It is hard enough to squeeze them into a large garden, and considerably harder to find space for them in small gardens. A lot of the herbs and flowers I grow to attract beneficials are grown as shorter border plants along the edges of raised beds or, if they are too tall to be true edging plants, I grow them at the ends of each raised bed, but not in the middles of the bed where the actual crop plants are growing. If you've ever seen a borage plant growing and spreading massively to try to outgrow the tomato plants beside it, you'll understand where I'm coming from. Of course, almost all my companion plants reseed readily, popping up anywhere and everywhere. I try to let them stay where they sprouted when I can, but if they start to outgrow the vegetable plants they're sitting next to, I either prune them back really hard or yank them out. I also grow tons of wildflowers outside the garden fence on all sides of the garden because they also attract beneficials. The area where most people fall short when planting to attract beneficials is that they fail to plan for the cool season. I have lady bugs, bees and other beneficial insects out even in January, frantically searching for food, so I do the best I can to provide for them. I always leave henbit wherever it pops up and let it bloom because so many beneficials depend on it in the cool-season. I have sweet alyssum and chamomile in bloom by February of most years and they attract many beneficials. I often have dianthus and violas blooming in February or early March. For early beneficials, you need extra-early plants to attract them and also to feed them. I never, ever, ever under any condition would consider ground ivy/Creeping Charlie to be a companion plant. It is a rampant, highly-invasive thug and I don't tolerate it anywhere. If you let it take hold and get established, you'll have it forever and it will be on a constant mission to take over every square inch of planting space, and it isn't just happy to occupy the garden. It will fight to stay in the lawn and in flower beds. Right now, if you walk out into my frozen garden, you'll still find green catnip plants (regrown since we dropped down to 4 degrees a few weeks ago), tansy and dianthus. You'll also find beneficial insects on them on all but the coldest days. You may not see the beneficial insects early in the morning on cold days, but you'll see them out by mid-day. When planting both cosmos and zinnias to attract beneficial insects, search out old-fashioned varieties that haven't had their nectar/pollen tampered with by modern plant breeders. Also, plant the shorter varieties that stay more compact and are easier to manage or you'll end up with huge cosmos and zinnia plants (easily attaining 4-5' in height) shading out surrounding plants. Same thing with nasturtiums. Grow only the short, busy ones, not the vining ones. While some of the more modern zinnias have tolerance of/resistance to powdery mildew bred into them and they look nice, they don't attract and keep beneficials like the old OP varieties do. I love companion planting and mixing in herbs and flowers with fruits and veggies all over the garden, but you have to manage the way you use companion plants or you'll find too much of your resources (soil, water, even light) going to them and not enough going to the edible plants you're growing. There are a few plants that make great trap plants, attracting pests to them. The way to use them is to grow them outside the garden itself in order to lure those pests away from the garden. Sunflowers are my favorite for this purpose. If you plant sunflowers outside the garden, maybe 10' from the garden, they'll attract stink bugs to them. Then, you can use the method of your choice to kill the stink bugs. Anything I can do to attract stinkbugs away from the garden in summer is worth doing. They are a horrible pest that feed on the fruits of most summer crops. The grain type amaranths are useful in this way to as they can lure some pests away from your garden.