Melissa wrote: "Climate in my garden is similar to Kim's but my care is different. I'm not nearly as nice to my roses in general.;) I water less, and feed differently I think. No chemical fertilizers at all." I think your "winter cold" is deeper than mine. (9b v. 10a, Sunset Zones probably between 18 and 19 for you, 20 to 21 for me) It seems your soil is quite a bit different in origin from what I've seen on line, being more of a deeper alluvium. Mine is the white shale layer of the Santa Monica Mountain formations. I water enough to keep plants alive, but not "thriving", particularly during the worst of the heat. I don't fertilize with anything other than prunings I shred and throw back on the soil surface as "mulch". I don't amend using anything, period. I avoid "organic" fertilizers due to the legions of moles, gophers, skunks, opossums, raccoons, coyotes, rabbits, rats, etc., all of which are either attracted by the organics themselves or to those which they attract. I don't need, nor wish to encounter any more "wildlife" that close to the house. Sometimes, it's a "witch" living this close to the "urban wilderness". I don't fertilize those in the ground with inorganic fertilizers, either. The soil is quite 'salty', as is the irrigation water. There has been no rain to flush the accumulated salts from the soil. Adding inorganics would only serve to intensify the "salts". I do use light, infrequent applications of inorganic fertilizer (always water soluble) to newly propagated, potted plants to replace the nitrogen they lose to watering. Being in an "extreme heat, extreme fire danger" area, I am allotted a relatively high level of "Tier 1" water use. I use, and have been using a quarter of that allotment, both to conserve the resource itself as well as to conserve the ever increasing cost of it. The areas I would normally irrigate show the reduced water consumption. I recently removed sixty feet of forty-plus year old escalonia hedge which had begun dying at one end and continued crisping and browning by the foot from the southern toward the northern end. Increasing the water to it had little positive effect, so eliminating the need, as I have done with all other plantings proving themselves "too needy", helps reduce the danger of combustion as well as need to increase the water bill. You might find this seedling of interest. Kim Here is a link that might be useful: Puzzlement

Jessaka, More people "love their fruit trees to death" by overwatering and overfeeding them than kill them by neglecting them. I hardly ever water my yard or trees, and I never fertilize them, because all that does is push them into unnaturally fast growth. I want them to grow at the natural rate that corresponds to the actual rain that falls (or doesn't fall) from the sky. I know that, if all our native trees can survive, grow and produce fruit based on nothing but rainfall (we have lots of native fruit trees in our acres of woodland and semi-woodland), then so can the fruit trees I've planted near the house. That's just my own personal philosophy, though, but it is based on a lifetime of growing fruit trees and observing two things: (1) in rainier years, fruit trees have more insect problems and more disease issues, and (2) in rainier years, the fruit are larger but the flavor is watered down. Also, trees that get more moisture (whether rainfall or irrigation) carry heavier loads of fruit AND foliage, and limb breakage is more common. In a rainier year, it seems like limb breakage (even on properly pruned trees) is much worse than it is in drier years. So, my trees get only rainfall or perhaps an inch or two of rain per month in drought periods when there is no rain at all and they never give me trouble. I read somewhere once that peach and apricot trees grow best in a couple of feet of sandy soil on top of clay. In that type of soil conditions, they have the good drainage provided by the sandy soil and they have good deep soil moisture in the clay beneath the sand. I choose the planting location for our trees based on that....they are in the sandiest soil I have and that band of sandy soil lies on top of thick, red Oklahoma clay, and so far it has worked out really well. It has worked out so well, in fact, that I wish our band of sandier soil were wider so I could plant more fruit trees there. We have some neighbors a couple of miles up the road who have about 6 or 8 fruit trees (judging from their size, they are semi-dwarfs) planted by the previous homeowners. These trees are so far from the house and water faucet, that I don't think you COULD water them, unless you have a couple of hundred feet of water hose, or carry water to them in buckets. They only get natural rainfall, therefore, and have been covered in fruit this year, having somehow survived the late freezes and heavy winds. (They are in a pretty sheltered low-lying area with lots of trees and buildings around.) These are trees that get no special attention and still produce a crop that surprised even me, because the trees weren't looking good at all when I saw them in mid-July, but they had plenty of peaches, including some very yummy white-fleshed ones. So, sometimes I think that the less we interfere with Mother Nature, the better. The first year or two that we lived here, there was a drought and I watered WAY too much, trying to make up for the drought and for the fact that I hadn't improved the soil "enough" yet. (And I KNEW I was watering too much, but was afraid everything would die if I stopped.) I did have greener, lusher foliage but also had every disease and pest issue in the book, so I completely stopped fertilizing and cut the watering back to no more than 1" of water per week, and all the disease and pest issues vanished. So, less water and only natural compost/mulch as fertilizer gives me a less perfect-looking landscape but also less diseases and few pests. I don't know if watering less would solve all the problems you've had with your fruit trees or not, but it did for me. And, of course, you cannot control the amount of rainfall your plants receive. When I lived in Fort Worth, I probably overfertilized and overwatered our landscape too much, but I had lovely, lush St. Augustine grass and I liked keeping it thick and gorgeous. Here, though, I've learned that less is more, and in the times we live in with lots of water rationing, it is probably better to underwater than to overwater. That's just me and my experiences, though, and no one else has to become a "minimalist" at watering just because I prefer it, but it works here for me in our soil and our climate. Dawn

The following is from the Kitchen Forum. It has directions for posting pictures. Posting a picture from your photo hosting account (e.g., PhotoBucket) First, where are your pictures? If on your computer only, you'll need to upload them somewhere on the web for the rest of us to see them. I upload pictures to PhotoBucket. Open an account w/PhotoBucket or other photo hosting site. Take a picture using a digital camera (or film camera but get them on disk when they're developed) Resize your pics so they're approx 400x300 (resize keeping the same proportions so they don't get distorted...i.e., don't specify a specific size, use %-ages or similar) Upload your pictures to your photo account Find the label that contains the link to the picture (In PhotoBucket, it's the box labeled "HTML Code") Copy that link and paste it into the "Message" box of a post. When you "Preview" your message, you'll see the picture.

I think I'm going to make it even more complicated. In total, I bought 6 rose bushes, with all 5 others grafted. When I bought the rose, the base is V shaped. One side looks like grafted, with thinner canes from the crown. But the other side of the V looks like own root. When I planted last summer, the lowest V is buried in ground, and the "graft" crown is just at the soil level. The rose was covered with 3" to 4" of wood chip mulch. I did lose some of the rose bushes since the graft unions were above ground. But this one had no problem. On both sides of the bush, the leaves look the same. I still can't explain if this is "grafted" or not. The bush grew strongly this spring. But the damn deer likes to bother it. It pulled down one of the canes. So I rooted and planted the cutting in pot. Due to deer and hot summer, the mother plant never sent out any bloom. Deer took care of the business. So far, I'm happy this mystery rose. And thank you all for the help.