Hi roserobin, I've have responded sooner, but got lost in Lynnette's lovely rose images, via the link you kindly provided. Wow! Do you happen to know if Lynnette ever opens her garden to visitors? Guess I'll have to email her (if that'a possible) and ask her. As someone who just started growing roses, the experience would be invaluable. I'm planning to order Nahema from Palatine Roses, info below. Thank you very much for your recommendations, which I will now go and research. I've started a Jacob's Robe rose beside an arch, and am hoping to wind it around, as I understand they only bloom when the canes are bent at an angle. Hope the rose is agreeable to this treatment. Many thanks, Pauline http://palatineroses.com/rose/nah%C3%A9ma Contact Us Based in the heart of the Niagara Region, Palatine Fruit & Roses is perfectly situated for growing roses and fruit of exceptional quality. Come visit us, and see our farm for yourself. Palatine Fruit & Roses 2108 Four Mile Creek Road, RR# 3 Niagara-On-The-Lake, Ontario L0S 1J0 You can also reach us by phone, fax or email. Phone: (905) 468 - 8627 Fax: (905) 468 - 8628 For mail order inquiries: sales@palatineroses.com Email: contact@palatineroses.com

Nat, I did additional research, and I am 99% certain that these are Western Flower Thrips. While they do not generally cause damage, if brought inside, they can infest indoor flowers. I do a soak of my peonies before bringing them inside to get rid of ants on the blossoms, but apparently those thrips can withstand a greater time underwater! I soaked mine for 45 minutes and brought them inside and it seems as if MOST of them are gone. The water doesn't seem to have any adverse affect on the blooms, since they usually withstand the rain pretty well. Now, to practical matters. What do we do to get rid of these. There are a number of beneficial insects that will help get rid of them, but, I have found, that these seldom work. And not to mention expensive. What sucks is that they are on the blooms, which makes chemical controls a problem as well. If you Google the thrips and beneficials, you should be able to find a good selection. I am beyond that at this point. I see that my iris are also infested, although to a lesser extent. Diatomaceous Earth can be a good way, if used carefully to get them, BUT, again, they need to come in contact with it. I have a systemic organophosphate that I am going to use so that I can get the bugs without having to get the flowers. It has Acephate AND Fenbutaine Oxide, both will kill thrips, and since Acephate is systemic, it will get them without application to the flowers, although the time to get to the flowers probably won't matter THIS year. It will probably help your clematis. I am SURE there will be plenty of people with help on the non-chemical side. I used to be all chemicals - spray the nastiest thing I could find, and now that is a last resort, but these tiny things, in my view warrant it! By the way, LOVE your peony pics. I think we have at least one white variety in common, althoug I forget the name! Sorry for my long-windedness! You are the ONLY reply I have had - and I posted in the Pests/Diseases forum as well! Good luck!!!!

Hi Kevin, The variety of causes for what ails any plant is often vast ranging from drought, fertilizer burn, freeze/ thaw damage, insects, injury, fungus and disease. What often drives gardeners is immediate need and risk of inaction. For other perspectives try contacting your county extension office and sending in these pix. Also try one of several online sources such as Yardener.com, AskMelinda and Gardening Know How Q& A. You may not get to an exact answer as to what has caused this puzzling problem but it may help you decide if you have to take action or can watch and wait. These trees grow very slowly, only about 9-12" per year. I agree that fall planting is ideal though I didn't always understand just how much better things fare when doing that. Summer planting is super stressful. When I planted mine in June I lost 2 within a month. They were throttled by storms. I just went and bought new ones that I planted in fall. They did better, not having to cope with transplant shock, storms, drought stress and the rest. So don't worry at all, if you find that you can't correct the problem then either let them hang around and see how they do for one year and replace them next fall or go ahead and do it this fall. Considering their slow growth the replaced ones won't be far behind the established ones.

Jennifer, I would not really describe the smell of a copperhead as being similar to a cucumber. It smells like a.....copperhead. It is sort of a musky smell, not as bad as the odor of a skunk, but not pleasant. Maybe it smells a little like a cucumber to some folks, but not necessarily to me. I have some friends who say it smells like copper to them. It doesn't to me. You won't always smell it. I usually smell it when I have walked by one and startled it. Copperheads don't want to tangle with us and usually will slip away if they can, but if they are startled or surprised and can't slip away because maybe a person is between them and their best escape route so that they feel trapped, they'll release that scent. I try to freeze in place when I smell it, first checking the ground near my feet to make sure I'm not about to step on one. Sometimes I can find them after I smell them, but sometimes I cannot. Brandywines do seem a bit more prone to have fused blossoms (aka megablooms) than many other varieties, especially from blooms formed when the nights still were cool. Usually as the season goes on, the megablooms become more and more rare. The fused blossoms do tend to produce very large fruit, but because of the way the skin of the different fruits fold together as the fruit enlarges, you often end up cutting away and tossing a significant portion of the ripe fruit, so lots of people just toss those flowers before they form fruit. I never do, merely because blossom drop happens so much here once we get hot that I hate to waste a single tomato blossom. Nancy, If you plant milkweed, you're just going to have milkweed pests. Insects cannot afford to be picky---if they have to eat milkweed to survive, they're going to eat any and all milkweed. I've never noticed that any particular type of milkweed is less susceptible to the specific pests than others are. Like everything else, the milkweed plants and their pests are natural parts of our ecosystem. If the pests are doing too much damage, just destroy them. I leave them alone if I can and wait for the birds or beneficial insects to take care of them. I've never had the tussock moth caterpillars here and do believe I'd kill those things in a heartbeat. Whether you appreciate it or not, the ecosystem is functioning properly. While we plant milkweeds for the monarchs, we also have to expect that anything else and everything else that feeds on them might show up too. I usually don't see milkweed pests until the fields turn brown and the milkweeds go to seed and, in dry weather, began to fade and dry and die back to the ground. Guess what? We're already that dry here. The milkweed plants in the fields look sad and pathetic and the pests are moving to the milkweeds in irrigated green gardens. It happens every year---if you are hungry, you go to where the food is found. Pest-free gardening is a myth perpetrated by chemical companies. A healthy garden is full of insects, both good and bad. Milkweeds existed on this land before we bought it. They are still here. They'll be here long after we are gone unless someone scrapes the ground bare and pours concrete on it. (What a horrible thought!) Nothing kills them, though excessively dry weather can make the ones in the fields die back to the ground. They often green up and grow again when rainfall returns in autumn. The milkweed in our flower border never dies back to the ground (I hope I didn't jinx them by saying that) but can look ratty if drought gets too extreme and I stop watering because I cannot water enough to help the plants stay in good shape. Sometimes I just give up in the heat and close the garden gate and tell the plants I'll be back in the fall, or after we get decent rainfall, and the milkweeds survive, so if they can take a couple of drought months with no water, they can handle feeding by most pests. Probably not the tussock moth caterpillars, but pretty much everything else. As for being a Monarch Waystation....don't think of it that way. That's a sort of gimmicky way to make people feel good about growing plants for the monarchs. I want to grow plants for the monarchs to help them, not so I can display a Monarch Waystation sign. (sigh) You aren't trying to have a monarch waystation for its own sake, right? Instead, you are trying to fix a broken (by others) ecosystem by providing habitat. Approach it with the attitude that you are restoring the ecosystem to what it once was and needs to be again and remember that doing so provides a habitat for everything and that will have everything inhabiting it....those insects and creatures we would choose to see and those that we'd rather not see around. It is the way of the world, and they all have their place somewhere in the food chain. Everything in any ecosystem eats something and everything gets eaten by something. Accepting that and not going overboard trying to micromanage the garden 'pests' is so much less stressful, and it is natural. God made the world and everything in it and I trust that he created those darn milkweed pests for some reason that he understands, even if we do not. My goal never has been to have an insect-free garden or landscape, nor is it to have pest-free plants, because such a thing isn't possible unless you use synthetic chemicals strong enough to kill everything. My goal is to have an ecosystem that is healthy, strong and balanced, where I interfere in the food web as little as humanly possible. Make peace with the pests and only destroy those that truly destroy plants, not those that just damage them. Look at it this way: plant asparagus and eventually asparagus beetles show up (and harlequin bugs). Plant brassicas and cabbage loopers, imported cabbage worms and diamondback moth worms will show up. Plant potatoes and Colorado potato beetles will show up. Plant okra and sharpshooters and aphids are likely to show up. Plant squash and you-know =-whos will show up. Plant sweet potatoes and morning glories and tortoise beetles show up. Plant milkweed and milkweed assassin bugs, milkweed leaf beetles, oleander aphids and tussock moth cats show up. It is the way things are. The older I get, the more I have learned to chill, relax and let the garden ecosystem just be an ecosystem. I have learned I can ignore most pests and the plants will outlast them, so I don't worry about anything except the ones experience has taught me do extreme damage to the plants we grow for a food harvest.. Blister beetles are an example of one you can ignore most of the time. After all, blister beetles are beneficial because they devour grasshopper eggs. However, on some plants (cucumbers and sweet autumn clematis, for example) they can eat the foliage down to nothing, so if they're doing that, a gardener really cannot ignore them. What matters the most, though, is how many blister beetles show up. If I see an occasional handful of them in the garden, I just ignore them. However if they show up by the hundreds or thousands, a gardener cannot ignore them. Rebecca, It is just one of those years with the Septoria Leaf Spot. It was really hit and miss in my garden, but definitely more widespread than usual (some years I don't see it at all) and, in a most interesting way, I saw very little Early Blight, which is more common in my garden. It is almost like the Septoria Leaf Spot outcompeted the Early Blight for the right to hit tomato plants randomly. Sorry about the squirrels. I was hoping those squirrel treats would work. I've always found it interesting that most tomato varieties that produce bite-sized fruit just do not seem to suffer from common fungal and bacterial foliar diseases like the varieties that produce larger fruit do. I've never seen this addressed in technical literature, but have observed it in my garden. These diseases may hit the plants, but the plants outgrow them and never stop producing either. I watered twice this week and probably will have to do the same next week. It just depends on how much the soil dries out. Tim is already fretting over the coming July water bill (which will arrive here in the first week of August) because, he says, the water bills haven't been at all bad this year and he dreads getting a high one. I laughingly told him to adjust his attitude and just be grateful that the water bills for January through June were not bad and to remind himself that a high water bill in July and August is normal and expected. lol. I also still don't think the July water bill will be that bad--I certainly am watering the remaining veggies and herbs, and all the flowers, much less than I water when I'm trying to keep a ton of tomato, cucumber and melon plants happy in the heat. I think he just needs something to fret about. It hasn't really felt hot here since that day our heat index hit 116. Of course, the obvious explanation is that after that miserable day, any other day will feel cool by comparison. (grin) Tim wasn't here that day though and was in his air-conditioned office at work, so he missed the worst of it. I think our heat index had dropped into the 70s or 80s by the time he got home because of all the rain storms around us that basically missed us but gave us rain-cooled air. (And, I believe, a measly 4/100s of an inch of rain.) I do think the heat returns at the middle of next week. Since that hot, miserable day, I've felt like our weather has been only warm, not hot, but by mid-week, we'll be hot again. We need to mow and edge everything tomorrow, and especially all the fence lines and such where the fields really are drying out now. Keeping as much vegetation as possible cut short reduces the fire danger, and we are starting to have fires. By the way, while typing this I have heard some fireworks going off in our neighborhood. Really, people? I think that by now people should have all that out of their system. Apparently they don't. Dawn