Revision to my thrips post

For everyone who has already read yesterday's post and moved on My Plan has been revised. Thanks to a very accomplished rosey friend I have new information on dealing with flower thrips that I need to pass on to you in addition to the change I made to yesterday's post. She suggested Saf-T-Side horticultural oil. She uses it to keep the thrips population under control and says it's cheap, doesn't burn except in the hottest summer temps, and is very friendly to beneficials. I did some investigating myself last night and found that she's right, of course. I wondered why such an easy, non-toxic remedy wasn't mentioned anywhere else in my searches for an answer to thrips - or maybe I was only looking at the chemical remedies. You can read about it HERE. 

As I was thinking about it last night, I became concerned about getting the spray on flowers because the oil damages them, and the whole point of spraying anything is to prevent damage to the blooms. Then I considered the timing. In two or three weeks I will prune (though not all of the bushes get pruned), so they will not have flowers or even much foliage on them. (Hmm, I'm recalling Dr. Malcolm Manners' practice of stripping leaves on all of his roses at pruning time.) The roses will be leafing out and setting flower buds during the weeks after that, and that's when the thrips arrive - just in time to hit all that tender new growth. That will be the time to spray the Saf-T-Side. 

There doesn't seem to be much difference to me between the Saf-T-Side and the spinosad except in their toxicity to bees which probably amounts to a huge difference ecologically. This spraying business is definitely a reach for my inexperienced brain. Gardening is surprisingly full of new experiences, and I'm trying not to lead you all down a path that might be wrong for you - again. 

As regards horticultural oils my smart rosey friend says, "When you mention oils, people will say they burn. If they investigate, as you did, and as I have done, they will find that the Saf-T-Side is different in its formulation. I tested it this summer when I had chili thrips. Wanted to use something other than spinosad if possible. It controlled them for quite a while and didn’t burn, even in summer heat. Temperatures now are very favorable for the use of oil and will continue to be so for several more months. A lot of the burning problem depends on the age of the leaves as well. The very youngest are simply more susceptible to burning. I absolutely hate to use insecticides of any kind anymore. Saf-T-Side accomplishes so many things that I expect to be using it for most everything when I feel the need to do “something” not water related."

The main point is that if you are producing beautiful roses with what you are doing, keep doing it! Conditions in Central Florida are very different from other places, so many pests/diseases manifest themselves differently here than in other areas. Take what I say and then do some homework on the internet, and then do what your gut tells you for your micro-environment that makes you comfortable. Roses aren't rocket science, but sometimes for me it can seem that way until I get my sea-legs on some new aspect. At any rate in this age of widely available information there's no reason to be confused and alone. We're all in this together.

Bungee bling

I took this photo last year on March 31st, intending to post it on this blog to show the get-up I had devised for disbudding and disposing of thrips-infested rose blooms. Turned out to be just too devastating to my fragile self-image, so I never used it. The season of thrips (the word is both singular and plural) is approaching again, and, apparently, they are a problem for gardeners everywhere both for ornamentals and veggies. The topic came up this week on The Roses Forum. It’s a very serious subject, but when I posted this photo last night, it evoked some good laughs. I’m going to quote here extensively from that thread.

The original poster, kpfl81 from Arkansas, was inquiring about the use of beneficial nematodes in battling flower thrips in her roses. She shared the results of her previous efforts to control the pests, as follows:

1. Tried insecticidal soaps & neem oil -- hardly any effect.
2. Bifenthrin & imidacloprid - marginal results.
3. Spinosad -- marginal.
4. Orthene -- this works; however, I have to apply almost every five days in order to keep the scoundrels down. At that rate, I start worrying about the health of the roses. Additionally, the Orthene smells so foul.

After reading the comments that followed I decided that I needed to get on the stick to be prepared for the onslaught that will come to my garden in late March/early April.  I did some research online, prepared to buy the nematodes. Found out it's expensive to ship, and since most of the thrips are on leaves, the soil treatment is not very effective. Apparently, in Florida they love oak leaves, and I am surrounded by oak trees. I had already bought the spinosad concentrate on my recent trip to Grower’s Fertilizer. It’s equivalent to Monterey spray (5% concentration), so that's what I will use, spraying the whole bush especially the undersides of leaves. There is also a Fertilome product that contains spinosad. It works because the thrips feed on the leaves as well as on contact. It is safe for bees once it is dry in a few hours. It is toxic to bees when wet, so they say to spray in the late evening or early morning when bees are not around, and I don't intend to get it on open flowers or on the flowers of companion plants. Meredith in NC “does it at night and also pulls off all the open flowers on the sages, etc. under the sprayed rose.” Spinosad loses its toxicity after 8 to 24 hours and so it may be necessary to reapply a few days later if new larva hatch.

  
I do not spray chemicals so this is a big deal for me. For the last two years I have been disbudding and deadheading the whole garden once I see that the thrips are here which did stop the repeated generations. My understanding is that the adult thrips inject their eggs into tiny, new flower buds where they grow and feed on the flower, damaging the flower at the very least and at worst preventing the flower from opening, called balling. Hopefully, killing the adults before they can accomplish this injection will protect the flowers. Typically, thrips favor light-colored roses, but last year red roses were effected. ‘Louis Philippe’ was decimated, even ‘Mrs B R Cant’ which in previous years was not bothered. Most of my roses are light colored & pastels. Not only is it disheartening to remove the whole spring flush which is the best of the year, but it is painful, backbreaking work. I look like a cotton-picker with the trash bag (taped to a large-mouth jug with the bottom cut off) tied to my waist, as shown in the photo. It usually takes two or three bags to get the job done, and when they're full, they're heavy. So I'm going to try the spinosad. I'm told that the thrips are here year-round, but April is their big breeding time. The rest of the year isn't bad, but it does explain why my blooms are never quite perfect with their brown-tinged edges.


 **  2/2/2013 - My Plan has been revised. Thanks to a very accomplished rosey friend I have new information on dealing with flower thrips that I need to include in this post. She suggested Saf-T-Side horticultural oil. She uses it to keep the thrips population under control and says it's cheap, doesn't burn except in the hottest summer temps, and is very friendly to beneficials. I did some investigating myself last night and found that she's right, of course. I wondered why such an easy, non-toxic remedy wasn't mentioned anywhere else in my searches for an answer to thrips - or maybe I was only looking at the chemical remedies. You can read about it HERE. As I was thinking about it last night, I became concerned about getting the spray on flowers because the oil damages them, and the whole point of spraying anything is to prevent damage to the blooms. Then I considered the timing. In two or three weeks I will prune (though not all of the bushes get pruned), so they will not have flowers or even much foliage on them. (Hmm, I'm recalling Dr. Malcolm Manners' practice of stripping leaves on all of his roses at pruning time.) The roses will be leafing out and setting flower buds during the weeks after that, and that's when the thrips arrive - just in time to hit all that tender new growth. I think that will be the time to spray the Saf-T-Side. There doesn't seem to be much difference to me between the Saf-T-Side and the spinosad except in their toxicity to bees which probably amounts to a huge difference ecologically. This spraying business is definitely a reach for my inexperienced brain. Gardening is surprisingly full of new experiences, and I'm trying not to lead you all down the wrong path - again. The main point is that if you are producing beautiful roses with what you are doing, keep doing it!

 
According to Wikipedia, “Spinosad is considered a natural product, and thus is approved for use in organic agriculture by numerous nations. Two other uses for Spinosad are for pets and humans… Brand names include Comfortis and Trifexis® …both brands treat adult fleas on pets.” Here’s another good article from the University of Connecticut.
 
Imidacloprid also works (it's in the Bayer drench), but it is systemic and kills bees because it gets in the pollen. REALLY, YOU SHOULD NOT USE IT (and other systemics) for the sake of the bees. The spinosad is also effective against grasshoppers and other bugs that chew on your leaves.
 
There is another product called "blue sticky thrips traps" that is available online. The thrips are actually attracted to the color blue. The sticky strips really are more of an early warning system than a cure. They clearly declare, “They’re baaack.” I'm also going to make my own "blue sticky traps" out of the large blue plastic drinking cups coated with vaseline and hang them throughout the garden. Lovely. Last year I used some kind of automotive lubricant (forgot the name) which was nasty to apply, but the vaseline will be much easier.
 
In learning how to grow roses organically I have become convinced that insecticides are a double-edged sword that can produce unintended bad results. For instance, using insecticides against spider mites produces worse infestations because they kill the beneficials that would have handled the mites had the gardener used a hard water spray and awaited their arrival. Something that we don’t realize sometimes is that insecticides kill ALL insects. ‘Broad spectrum’ is the term that’s used. Since there are beneficial insects called predators that gardeners want to encourage to inhabit their gardens, it is absolutely counter-productive to spray these broad-spectrum insecticides. And perhaps you’ve heard of the devastation to bee populations in recent years. As far as I'm concerned, the bees are a protected species and are welcome, friendly guests in my garden. I love listening to their buzzing as I go about my work in the garden. So let's be safe out there and kind to our beneficial bug friends.
 
My afore-mentioned laughs came from Merlcat’s response to my photo which I must include:

It's the bungee that pulls the outfit together.
Bungee bling?! :)
All jokes aside. I love this picture. This is how beautiful gardens are made. Getting dirty and wearing garbage bags and bungees! :)

Aren’t gardeners wonderful?!

 
To read the entire thread on GardenWeb's Roses Forum, go HERE.

Thrips

They’re the teensiest bugs you’ve ever seen with your naked eyes. Of course, you can’t see them if you don’t deliberately go looking for them, but it’s not hard to know where to start looking.



Light colored roses are the prime targets for thrips. I don’t know why. However, I was greatly dismayed today to find that ‘Enchantress’, a magenta Tea Rose, was infested with them. The photos here are of ‘Clotilde Soupert’, but ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ and ‘Duquesa’ were ruined also.



Clotilde has been blooming for a good while but she’s building for her first big flush – or I should say was. I wasn’t going to, but I decided to de-flower them today. I compare this task to picking cotton even though I have no experience picking cotton. I wear a trash bag tied to my waist which gets quite heavy with the many, many ruined blooms that I drop into it, and the required position is bent over at the waist leaning over and into the bush. This is why I wasn’t going to do it, but the thought of having roses that look this awful for weeks and weeks changed my mind and made me choose the pain. You see, the thrips larvae fall to the ground and then mature to fly and lay their eggs in the next crop of flower buds…and the next and the next for several generations through the end of April usually. So my perspective is to end it now by disposing of the flowers and the larvae in them before they can reproduce. Last year the next flush was fine.



Once the sepals have opened even just a little bit it’s obvious that thrips are in the bud because of the stained petals that show, and no amount of wishful thinking will save them at this stage. They have already been infested for a good while. The blooms will most likely ball and never open…



and if perchance they do open, they are as ugly as sin and have to be deadheaded anyway. I figure this flush is lost anyway so why not get rid of it and start the rose moving toward rebloom.

This is ‘White Maman Cochet’, usually an exceptionally beautiful Tea Rose. You can see the buggers by parting the petals open and looking down at the base of the flower. The light-colored creepy-crawly things will be scurrying around, but you’ll have to look hard. They really are tiny.

I’m thinking ‘Chrysler Imperial’ has them by the looks of his crispy outer edges and unusual form. I didn’t think about it being from thrips so I didn’t break it open to check. The removed flowers and buds need to be disposed of in a way that the thrips can’t escape to re-invest. One word of warning...be careful wear you stick your nose this time of year.

‘Hermosa’ was beautifully unscathed. The buds of ‘Madame Abel Chatenay’ are still tightly closed, so I don’t know about her yet. She had them last year, so I’m assuming she will again.



Early in the season there’s a lot to be said for pink roses.

Climbing trees

On Sunday I did stuff that I had been putting off. Stuff that involved a ladder, a grabber, loppers and a shovel. Loppers and a shovel in a rose garden can't be good. I have been ambivalent about two roses (probably more than two but we're not going there), and two days ago, having moved a good sized Hydrangea paniculata 'Pinky Winky' and removed Rosa 'Fellemberg' from the garden, my momentum built to a point where I could say, "Let's do it."

The first dreaded chore was dealing with 'Francois Juranville'. Almost two years in the ground, this rose is a rambler (translation: a big honking climber) and a once-bloomer (but possibly a repeater in Florida). He's growing on an 8' tall and 8' wide homemade rebar arbor. Here he is on May 2nd.

When I chose him, I didn't care that he may only bloom once in the spring. I just wanted something that would cover this arbor which is in partial shade. FJ fit the bill. He had grown up 8', then across 8', and was very close to growing all the way down again 8' which really wasn't too attractive. A rose will be what it is genetically supposed to be without regard for a gardener's poor planning - or non-planning. However, my goal with this rose was always to let him grow up into the oak trees, eventually causing them to be in bloom when their branches are covered with Francois Juranville's flowers. How cool!

Well, gravity had something to say about letting him grow up into the trees. Francois needed assistance in becoming upwardly mobile. So on Sunday I got out the ladder and DH's grabber and worked at inserting his lengthy canes up into the trees, trying to persuade them to hook onto something besides me.

So now he's up in the trees. The interesting and mind-blowing thing about this rambler is that each of these dozen or more 20-plus-foot-long canes will bring forth multiple side-shoots of equal length, and that each of them will do the same, and on and on. This is commonly known as a house-eater. Before planting such a rose do ascertain that there is ample real estate that it can call its own. You can be sure of one thing - the fact that you don't have ample real estate will not prevent the rose from taking whatever you do have. I figure he can have all of that tree canopy that he can cover.

Which brings me to the tale of the loppers and 'E. Veyrat Hermanos', a climbing Tea from 1895 that I was growing on a long, high trellis on my property line, eight feet from the house. I grow 'Maman Cochet, Climbing' this way, and she handles it well, having stiff canes that support her tree-like canopy. EVH is different - not as stiff but just as heavy as 'Maman Cochet, Cl' and not as flexible and pliable as 'Reve d'Or'. He flopped instead of holding his canes up in the air. Since I was unable to construct a proper pergola for him to climb up and cover, he simply poured down on both sides of the trellis. The only means left to me for controlling him was to cut his canes, lightening them enough so that they sprang up above head-high. Sad to say, this is not the proper treatment for this rose since it destroyed its natural shape and growth habit. I blew it. This photo shows the 5-ft wide path inundated with rose canes, a path that no one but me was silly enough to tread.

I knew of someone in South Florida growing EVH on a 12'x20' pergola which the rose covered handily. One might think that would be sufficient warning, but a newbie is ignorant  and even sometimes unteachable. So the day of reckoning came on Sunday despite my sincere and numerous plans to build a structure more suitable for this humongous rose - a rose which had not been much more than a spring bloomer much bothered by thrips and balling.

Once again the camera arrived after half of one side was already cut away.

Going, going

Gone

The sheer volume of this rose was more than I could physically handle, demanded more real estate than I had to give, and almost did me in when cutting it down. Those loppers get heavy towards the end of the second hour of use. Have you figured out the moral of this story? Put succinctly, I must not bite off more than I can chew. 

A garden and the gardener can be overwhelmed if attention is not paid to the growth habit and eventual size of a rose bush and/or climber, especially in a warm climate with an extended growing season. If the words 'house eater' or 'monster' ever enter the conversation, gardeners be warned. Unless you have acreage and plan to let the rose grow naturally into a mounding thicket, much time and labor will be expected of you in order to train a plant like this into the civilized thing of beauty of your dreams.

With roses as with battles discretion is the better part of valor, especially for beginners. Of course, it's easy enough to cut down and dig up a rose that turns out badly, but think of all the time and effort wasted on the wrong rose when the right one could still be growing, blooming and looking beautiful.

Audacious deadheading

In my small garden I believe the days of timid (and quick & easy) snapping of spent blooms are in the past. Yesterday I took pruners in hand and set out to limit at least some of the expansionism of my rose bushes in the front garden. Turns out most of them were full of thrips so the timing was good, and now there are no flowers left, except for 'Le Vesuve'.  In the process I discovered a very cool thing about polyanthas.

I have always struggled with how to deadhead these cluster-blooming polyanthas (I'm not sure but modern floribundas might work the same way), not wanting to remove any growth or future blooming from my young plants that I desperately wanted to be bigger - soon. I have two 'Clotilde Soupert's, 'Lauren', 'Softee', 'Anda', 'Cal Poly', 'Etoile de Mai' and 'Sweet Chariot'. Most of the time their clusters have two main stems, one coming off at an angle with a small leaf at the base.  Sometimes I would just grab the cluster as though I was shaking hands with it and pull it through, stripping off the flowers, and sometimes I would cut the cluster stem but never far enough to remove the unsightly leftover stems or ugly naked clusters, fearing budeyes were there. Yesterday I found that these plants are amazingly consistent. Looking back along the cane from the cluster or from the occasional single blooms, past the small leaf at the base of the angled bloom stem, the next leaf always had a leaf bud sprouting from the budeye. That's where I cut. Sometimes that second leaf was a pretty long distance from the cluster, but I cut there anyway, knowing that any extra cane I left would simply die and turn brown and ugly.

Beautiful rose bush: 'Clotilde Soupert', bred in 1889 in Luxembourg by Soupert & Notting

The result of my audacious deadheading was a beautifully shaped bush ('Clotilde Soupert' is the prettiest evergreen plant I know) with no ugly pedicels sticking up (left behind after snapping off only the flower) and no naked clusters waiting to turn brown, AND by removing at least 8" of growth I believe I went a long way toward keeping them a manageable size for my increasingly packed garden. Of course, the negative side of this practice is the time and effort it demands. Oh, well, no such thing as a free lunch - even in rose gardens.

'Mme Abel Chatenay', always so beautiful, was not this spring. Her flowers were fringed in brown and didn't last long at all. The problem? Her first attack of thrips. So disgusting. So all of her flowers and buds are gone, too, in an effort to rid the garden of these teensy beasties. You can spot the infested buds by the brown stains on the unfurled petals. She's getting pretty big, too, so it was an opportunity to downsize and shape her up just a bit.

Since they are smallish plants, my three 'Hermosa' bushes are planted closely in a triangle for maximum impact. I've been deadheading them this way since last year since reading that being part Bourbon they benefit from this trimming and will be bushier and less spindly. Some of the plants did not end up as a 'pretty bush' like CS did, since they had already become a little spindly, but I have the hope of pretty bushes when they fill out after this more intensive nipping. Like pruning azaleas after spring bloom, they respond with new growth and more leaves. Even though these were also showing new growth at the budeyes, sometimes I went past the first one, trying to make them a little more compact and symmetrical.

The three 'Hermosa' bushes with the bright green leaves are at the back along the sidewalk and driveway. This is in August, 2009, and I was struggling to keep leaves on my bushes without much success. It turned out the problem was lack of water. I was watering by hand every other day after work. Now I have a micro system that runs every morning for 30 minutes and uses less water. The twiggy thing under the tire is one of the 'Clotilde Soupert's, really suffering. A 'Red Ruffle' azalea is in the middle, and 'Souv de Francois Gaulain' is at the bottom.

Same camera position today, a year and a half later. You can't see the azalea, but it's still there. SdFG with the blue-green leaves is at the bottom, taking up much more space. Hopefully, you can see the 'Hermosa's sticking up at the top, and CS minus all her flowers is to the right of the tire. 'Lauren' and 'Sweet Chariot' are in pots at the bottom corners.

In getting rid of the infecting flowers and buds I've read that we're supposed to put them in a sealed bag and throw them away with the trash because they fly and will move on to destroy other flowers. When I had removed them before, that was what I did. However, this time I had a very large reusable 'debris bag' made of tarp material that was full of trimmings of all sorts that I would normally dump at the curb for the garden waste truck. (No, I could not drag two bags behind me in the baking sun. I'm not that organized and don't think that far ahead - maybe next time. Having one bag with me at the start was unusually well planned for me.)

So...what could I do with these awful bugs? I found some old ant & roach spray in the garage (we have tubes-in-the-walls pest control, so we no longer have to spray for the nasties.) I sprayed the contents a lot and folded the top down and stood my handy pick-ax on it. Handy? I failed to put it away when I dug the driveway bed. I'm so terrible, but it worked out well this time, except that I stubbed my bare toe on the blade the other day. Ouch!! I might give the bag another dose of roach spray before I put the contents out at the curb next week. Surely they will have died cooped up in that bag with those poison fumes, don't you think? OK, let's not be dumb. I googled and found that Permethrin kills thrips. I'll go read the Raid can........YES, it has it!!

To sum up, knowing where to cut my rose bushes is a huge relief and makes my new, more demanding task simpler at least. Probably doing a bush or two in an evening won't be too difficult, especially since it's only once every six to eight weeks, and while I'm at it, it will be exhilarating realizing that I know better now what I'm doing with these roses. Little by little, they say. Fortunately, old garden roses don't care too much if their gardener is less than brilliant.

The garden centerpiece, 'Le Vesuve'. Perhaps you remember him after pruning. Well, he is again bulging at the brick borders of this 6-ft diameter bed. He's probably 4-1/2 feet tall. It just occurs to me that he makes me look brilliant. Now you know the truth!