Thanks for the link, terrijean, emailed you privately. In the meantime do you think some of us could brainstorm and try that mixture? What proportions would be safe? I'm not real confident it would work, that maybe they had gorged enough there and sought a more plentiful food source elsewhere. Still usually they dwindle in numbers and wouldn't leave en masse like that, could be coincidence, just don't know at this point if it was due to what she sprayed. Since I have a one-gallon sprayer, I was thinking of trying 1/2 cup of each, using RealLemon, white vinegar and Ivory Liquid and fill the sprayer up with water and mix well, probably not this year. I'd have to refill that sprayer a lot to spray all the stuff they have been on. Also the article did not jive with a link anntn6b TN posted about the origin of the beetles in the US. That article said the JB's came in a shipment in the soil of the roots of iris or some plant and got loose in NJ was it, don't know which thread that link was on but read the article in its entirety? Anyway it had nothing to do with what the article said, that they were deliberately imported to control mites. Maybe the person quoted had them confused with those orange ladybugs that became such a nuisance in the fall. I see the red ones are back in my yard in small numbers, had not seen any in years. Finally, the article mentioned Sevin. I will read more on that, but but thought the residual effects of that were harmful to bees because of an ingredient in it. Since it said not to spray flowers, unless it acts as a repellant, I don't see how that would work very well for blooming roses. I'm trying not to use anything with the ingredient imidacloprin in many Bayer products because I saw with my own eyes the residual effects kill/disable/disorient bees even at around the 48-hour mark and after a fairly heavy rain (see pesticides and bees thread on the OGR forum now on p2). Wow, she REALLY had them bad, sounds almost as bad or worse than that old Alfred Hitchcock movie, "The Birds" the way they were swarming so she couldn't even go outside. So they must be really bad where you are. I'm not too far from you, maybe 100 mi or so in E. IA, and I'm still counting about 20 or so a day. I'd cut off the rest of my blooms as so few are going now but fear they would still just attack something else, and they are easier to find and pick out of rose blooms. Shaking my bushes would not work. Most are too big, most would land on the ground and not bucket, even a 5-gal one, and some are deep in blooms and cling stubbornly or would fly away.

Mmm, autumn always seems like the start of the gardeners year - new bulbs, lots of pruning, cuttings for overwintering, harvest, ladling on compost and planting the new bare root fruits, roses and shrubs. After a truly bizarre rainless summer, the allotment has turned sere and brown much earlier than usual. Rudbeckias, dahlias and heleniums and asters had an attenuated show - I always struggle with these prairie type beauties on my sandy soil but one must have them. This year, not even emergency hosing was going to prolong the luminous late summer show of golds, bronzes and purples so I turned my face to the gravel garden which never fails to thrive. Melissa, how I love spanish broom - yep, Spartium junceum can be a thug but what a gorgeous fragrant and elegant one. They twist and bend, making fantastically gnarly shapes and grow huge and fat in East Anglia. Cytisus also grows to shocking tree size, as does Tamarix. Desperate savage pruning has been done. even though the shrubs in question are less than 6 years old, they are eating the shed. A glorious stipa gigantea, planted so carefully to filter the low evening sun, has been overshadowed one one side and totally mugged by a giant acanthus on the other. In truth, the entire gravel garden has to be redone, lifting the remnants of the old membrane (which utterly failed to prevent the millions of verbena, centranthus, ox-eye daisies, althea and eryngiums from seeding with total abandon) and replacing plants which should never have been placed there (legion - Dieramas, Schizostylus, echinaceas - embarrassing how clueless I was to plant these moisture lovers in gravel!!!)Then there are the plants which clearly love it but are far too keen - helianthemums, nepetas, salvias, hebes - small cushions are ground swallowing mounds. Apart from lots of lavender - I have hedges of L Hidcote - the deepest blue, I do not have as many silver plants as I would like. A colony of pulsatilla does well with summer silky seedheads. Santolina and a lone artemisia (Powis Castle - another huge thing). Would like to try astelia and also celmisias. A plant grown much by Ingrid, and a revelation to me, was Limonium - violetta, I have and it looks terrific with eryngiums and stipa tenuissima. Stachys or Phlomis have, so far, failed to touch my heart and I have done verbascums to death. Still throwing out flowers is the modest Zauschneria, looking good with the last of the escholzias, Salvia greggii and microphylla are flowering profusely and unstoppable. Also, pushing out another cycle of flowers - a lovelu silver leafed mound of erodium chrysantha (might be good for you, Melissa, it is a lovely thing). However, much of this is happening out of my sight since I am woefully stuck at home in a kitchen which resembles Entebbe. A simple flooring job turned into armageddon - the massively heavy cast-iron and enamel sink is upside down on the sofa, the old washing machine has been drug to the tip and a new (to me) one has arrived - although the sink issue means it is still in the middle of the kitchen. Am running out of knickers and socks - may have to be a slut and turn them inside out since the whole water system is now only usable with a lot of fiddling about with stopcocks. In a moment of frenzy, I thought we may as well go the whole way and ripped off great swathes of old painted wallpaper - which of course, came off really easily....on one wall - the rest seems as though it was cemented in position. The ingrates (offspring) have absented themselves for large amounts of time yet still manage to materialise at sensitive (shouty, sweary) moments and chip in with ludicrous suggestions (we could put speakers in the new sink cupboards, why don't we have an indoor hammock?)Estimates of finishing time have gone from 'around a week' to 'in time for Christmas'. We are eating a lot of 'bread based snacks' - although the rate of jam consumption is worrying as I was definately slack this year, using the virusey raspberries as an excuse to cut down on all the 'earth mother' nonsense I had somehow got myself into(what was I thinking?) May be forced onto chocolate spread - sweetheart can have marmalade (shudder). Even so, it has been a spectacular tomato year (no rain - no blight)- have had kilos and kilos from 40 plants. I now have wrists of iron from poking hundreds of tomatoes through a sieve. The first bareroots will be arriving soon so I will have every reason to flee the kitchen chaos.

Okay, I'll bring some fig cuttings. Thank for the offer, but I have three figs trees which is all I have room for. Does anyone have seeds or small plants of the little vine LOVE IN A PUFF? If you do I'd like to get it going again. Reworked the beds it was in so thoroughly it didn't come back this year. BTW, I found some four inch pots of PORTERWEED at ARE so don't need those. Hopefully, I'll have some to share next year. See you all about this time tomorrow :-) MacArthur Park opens at 9:00.

Take a sniff of a cut leaf/stem. If it smells like garlic, its garlic chives. I use them to line beds, they fill in fast and thick--and during the heat of the summer send up tall stalks with white flowers on 'em that wave in the breeze. They stay evergreen too. In the spring, clean 'em up, pull the brown leaves out of the beds and you're done. You can use them like monkey grass but they get a bit taller. If you don't like 'em you can pull 'em out, unlike monkey grass that you never can get rid of. I like to snip some leaves and scramble them with eggs, or anything else I'm cooking.