Good grief, Jan! Take it easy and get some rubber grips for the bottom of that step stool! I haven't posted in such a long time but check in from time to time. Was thinking of everyone today, made me think of ghosts, how sometimes we know someone is around, we can sense them, we just can't see them. On the flip side, there stands the ghost with so much to say, but no one can hear them. Work consumes my life these days. Just when I finish deploying an entire Division, there are Reservists and National Guardsmen standing at the door. When I get a moment of peace, I catch a glimpse of my own ghost standing close. I just can't seem to catch her and pull her in to make me what I once was. So I throw myself back into my work and convince myself that it's what I am suppose to do. The NE National Guard are here, I get to work with them next week and I'm looking forward to it. I automatically thought of Gandle when I saw they were arriving, life has a funny way of tieing strangers together. When their advance party arrived earlier this week, they told me I had quite a reputation back in NE. I told them I had never stepped foot in NE, so someone must be writing on bathroom walls again. A big strapping Sergeant, someone I thought as the epitome of a farm boy, stepped forward and said "Ma'am, we don't have many bathrooms in NE so we write on the sides of barns!" Their sense of humor is charming and I've mentally noted that I must travel through NE before I die. I stay out of the garden as much as it's possible for one with a love of gardening to do. The time has come for me to give up this house. As DS puts it "cry me a river, build me a bridge, and get over it". I've cried the river, the bridge is almost complete, but it's so hard to get over it. I keep telling myself it's silly to be so attached to a house. It's JUST A HOUSE, for Pete's sake. But to me, it was more than a house. It was a home. My first real home. I set down roots here and, while those roots can be dug up and replanted, there will be transplant shock. I had found a house to rent, for renting is what I've decided to do at this point, but the gal who is currently in it had her deployment date extended by 90 days. She has graciously offered to let me take over if I'd allow her to rent one room, but I'm over analyzing the situation and have concluded that perhaps this is a sign that I'm not suppose to live in this house. I know, seems silly, but some days I feel like I've missed reading a lot of signs in the past and that's why I am where I am. Or perhaps it's just my way of putting off the inevitable. Whatever the reason, I stay out of the garden for fear that I'll be overwhelmed with sadness at the the reality of having to leave behind my heirlooms. All the kittens that arrived last August were placed in homes, along with their mother. I kept one for myself, a skitish solid black one we call Boo who has attached herself to me and drools when she purrs. Being the stupid human, I failed to have her spayed and it only took her getting out once to become pregnant. Being the stupid human, I miscalculated her conception date (or totally lost a month of my life somewhere) and when I came home from work on Wednesday night, she had delivered one kitten back behind a huge stack of boxes. Later on (seemed like 3 hours later), she delivered a second kitten. So, I now have 2 solid black kittens that will need homes in a few months. And Boo will be spayed as soon as possible. This crazy cat has decided she doesn't like the birthing box, and she doesn't like having them in her cat bed, and she doesn't like having them in a basket. No matter where I moved her and babies to, she kept moving them to the hallway. Cats definitely own the human, I caved and let her stay where she was happy. I seemed to have caught some type of crud that's going around and while sitting here last night feeling like death warmed over, my phone rang. It was my old employee who was medically retired (finally) last year. She got sick, the doctors deemed her heart to be failing. Once they got her stabilized, they found a lump in her breast...it was malignant and had spread to her lymph nodes. This was only 7 short months after losing my other employee to cancer, and this fact is always in the back of my mind. We spent 3 hours on the phone catching up, she had her first cancer free mammogram, but they found nodes on her thyroid and have biopsied that. And she had an internal defib implanted last week. She feels good but lives in fear that some day something will go wrong and her daughter will find her body. So she sold her house, her daughter and hubby sold their house, and they bought a new one...75 miles north of here. I'm happy for her, but the thought of someone else crossing that bridge I'm incapable of crossing depresses me. After a 3 hour converation, we ended with a promise to get together for lunch in a few weeks, while she's still close enough to do so without my having to pack an overnight bag. And that thought once again brought me back to thoughts of Gandle who drives hundreds of miles to a basketball game while I'm incapable of driving a simple 75 miles. And that has what brought me here, the ghosts of strangers standing so close that I can sense them, but not touch them... Maryanne

Frances, For all my roses I spray Ortho Rose Pride once every 10 days. Everyone usually tells me spray once a week but that's just too often for my busy schedule so I figure 3 times a month is fine. I buy the 16 oz concentrate liquid form from Home Depot for $13.97 and it lasts forever! I mix 1 TBSP of the liquid concentrate with 1 gallon of water and 1 TSP of Spreader Sticker to make sure the stuff sticks to the leaves. I always spray super early in the morning like around 6 am or early in the cool evening around 6 pm because you don't want the hot sun to burn the solution onto the leaves. Using a hand-held spray bottle I spray a nice heavy mist onto the top of all the leaves and a light spray beneath the leaves as well. On average it takes me about 30 to 40 minutes to spray all 69 rose bushes in my back and front garden. For you and your 6 roses you should be done in 5 minutes. Easy peasy :) Now if you want to be an extremist and go the extra route for show quality roses then you can also grab a systemic formula like Bayer Advanced All-In-One. It comes in liquid form and slow-release granular form. If you're interested I wrote a thorough review of the liquid product on Lowe's website that you can read here. This stuff is absolutely amazing for older (18+ month) roses but not to b eused on younger roses. DO NOT whatsoever use that stuff on newly planted roses or container roses. This stuff will severely burn or kill them. I made the mistake of using this stuff on all my roses and ended up murdering 3 of my newer roses which I feel horrible for :( Also I recommend cutting the dosage in half for your first application, then 75% on your 2nd, and 100% thereafter. If you want to go the organic route I've read that insecticide soap is pretty good but I have no experience with it yet. So far my biggest headache with growing roses in Florida are thrips. OMG I hate them !!! If you find that your roses have rusty brown edges those are thrips munching away on the petals, NOM NOM NOM - I tried using Bayer's $5 insect control for the thrips but it's a joke because I go through one bottle so fast. The systemic release formula seemed to be the only thing that worked for me. I would love to hear from others though if anyone else has advice on thrips! Last but not least during the hot summer months I water all my roses twice a day. Once in the morning when I wake up and let the dogs out around 8 am and again in the evening when I get home from work around 6. From late fall until February I then back down to 2 times a week. I can go on and on about my feeding and fertilizing as well but you specifically asked about black spot and rose disease so I figured I'd answer that question directly first. My apologies for the long-winded response. Hopefully some of that info was helpful :) OH! I almost forgot, Most of my advice I got from Mr. Nelson, the owner of Nelsons Florida Roses and my friend Jim who tends to the roses at Leu Gardens. If you can't find Rose Pride at your local nursery or a box store, Nelsons Florida Roses recommends these products for fungicide: - Ortho Rose Pride ( Triforine ) - Ortho Orethenex - Valent Triforine - Copper and Maneb Combination Sprays - Fertilome Lawn and Garden Fungicide - Fertilome HALT Fungicide For monthly Thrips control they recommend: - Spinosad or Conserve - Orthene - Cygon - Bayer Advanced Rose and Flower Insect Killer For Spider Mite Control ( Upon appearance ) - Organocide

Never thought about it being baby grub. Funny how it's only just arrived in my garden this year because a few crows have always been around the area. Back to the netting!

Someone on Hot Topics has posted a video of Sasha Baron Cohen accepting an award from the Anti-Defamation League. It's worth looking up. Cohen makes the point that lies and hatred are being spread far and wide by Facebook and Google -- unchecked -- as some sort of 'entertainment'. I agree with him that these for profit companies should be held to the same regulations as newspapers, broadcasters, magazines, movies, etc. NOT to disseminate fake news and foment hate. "Free Speech" has bounds. Journalism slid into this when it began presuming that *everything* has 'two sides'. No, not everything is 'debatable'. Facts do not have 'alternative meanings'. A pound IS 16 ounces, not some alternative number. Regarding this thread, President Trump DID withhold aid to Ukraine while demanding that Ukraine announce an investigation that he could use to smear his political rival. It is not "OK" to so abuse the office of the President, nor to use taxpayer money for personal profit.