Hazardous Roses

This is the first of several articles I will be posting about the hazards of growing roses, both to the rose gardener and the environment.  I am the first to admit that I have been guilty of creating these hazards, both to the environment and to myself, through the extensive use of fungicides and insecticides in my gardens.  By the same token, I have also learned a great deal over the years about minimizing the use of chemicals through integrated pest management (IPM), which I would like to pass along to my readers.

First, let me say that I believe it is necessary to use at least some insecticides and fungicides in growing roses.  All roses are susceptible to attacks by spider mites, aphids, Japanese beetles (JBs) etc., and it is virtually impossible to completely control these insects in a large garden by sharp sprays of water or, in the case of JBs, by hand picking.  By the same token, it is virtually impossible to grow exhibition quality roses without controlling the multiple spores of black spot and anthracnose funguses through the use of fungicides.  I know there are gardens that spray nothing at all, but these are also gardens that are subject to insect infestations and funguses during a significant part of every growing season.  

So the question is not whether to use chemicals; it is which chemicals provide the greatest effectiveness with the fewest hazards to the environment and the gardener; and how often those chemicals should be used.  The good news is that some of the best insecticides and fungicides are also among the least hazardous and require the lowest frequency of use.  The bad news is that many people are confused by which chemicals to use; plus they are led to believe that they must use chemicals every week or two, in order to keep them effective.  That is not at all surprising because it is in the interest of chemical manufacturers to sell their particular products and convince you to use them often.

I just paged through the most recent edition of the American Rose, the magazine of the American Rose Society, which, for many of us, is the bi-monthly rosarian bible.  In this edition, I found no less than 15 separate ads and references for rose chemicals.  Rosemania, which in my opinion is the best provider of rose growing supplies in the country, lists 16 different rose chemicals in this month’s ad, alone.  (As a side note, I am astounded at the prices for some of this stuff!)  At the front of the magazine, the ARS lists its tested and endorsed chemicals.  So, are these the safest and most effective chemicals?  Not necessarily, in my opinion.  I am sure the ARS could not publish the American Rose without the advertising revenues from chemical manufacturers and distributors, so it is difficult for them to state opinions on which products are the safest and most effective.  Not since the passing of Howard Walters, who provided his opinions in his monthly “Rosarian Ramblings” columns, have we had any such direction in the American Rose.

 

Howard’s shoes are way too big for me to fill but I will try, in the weeks ahead, to describe what I believe are the safest and most effective chemicals available to us as rose growers today.  I have already done some of this in several of my previous blog posts; most notably “There’s a Fungusamongus”: http://jack-rosarian.blogspot.com/2012/07/theres-fungusamongus.html and “Good Results Using Demand CS on JBs”: http://jack-rosarian.blogspot.com/2012/07/good-results-using-demand-cs-on-jbs.html .

 

I am also very interested in the effects on the environment of what we spray.  Specifically I will address effects on beneficial insects, especially bees and the extensive world-wide problem of colony collapse disorder (CCD).  It now appears that we are contributing to CCD with the extensive use of imidacloprid (Merit) and other insecticides containing neonicotinoids in the rose garden.

 

Finally, I will be addressing personal safety through the use of proper breathing apparatus and overall bodily protection.  Unfortunately, I have had personal experience with the effects of spraying rose chemicals with protection I thought was sufficient, but which clearly was not.

 Stay tuned.

 

 

Snow, Glorious Snow!

The very best winter protection for our roses is a foot of snow and that's exactly what we got today, Sunday, December 9th.  Not only does it provide better insulation than you can get from any other kind of winter protection, but it also gives you lovely, trickling moisture in the spring, when it melts.  One of our Twin Cities Rose Club members, Tim Schmaltz, once said, jokingly, that the TCRC ought to invest in a snow-making machine, to be hauled around to members' gardens, in winters when we don't get enough snow before our coldest weather in January.  More truth than joking in that idea!  One of the things I do to supplement the snow cover on my beds is to run my snow blower along the edges and throw snow up on the beds from the lawn.  This works particularly well in years when we don't get much snow, like last winter.

So, to paraphrase Dickens' "Oliver Twist":  "Snow, Glorious Snow"!

Here are a few pictures of my rose beds taken early this afternoon.  Note that my leaf cylinders and bags are thoroughly supplemented with a beautiful white layer of insulation.

Here is my Buck Earth Song bed, with my koi pond and Morden Centennial bed in the background.  I have posted this same view in the summer-time several times.

Below are two tiered beds with a variety of Buck roses and Hardy Canadiens, such as Winnipeg Parks (left) and Morden Blush (right)

Below is the Earth Song bed looking in the other direction, i.e. up toward the deck where the first picture was taken.

A little broader panorama of the tiered beds and the back of our house in the snow.



Below: The Buck "Carefree Beauty" and "Earth Song" bed in front of our house.  The pretty tree is a "Thornless Hawthorn".  The fence is there to keep our cat away from any dead voles that have taken the Zinc Phosphide poison positioned around the bed in tin-cans and large black plastic rodent traps.  Now that the snow is on the beds, I won't worry about him getting at the poison itself.  (Note how the camera flash caught the big snow flakes falling).

Below are four Buck "Earth Songs" in a little bed at the edge of our garage.  Again, the fence is for the cat.

 

Snakes

Well, since there isn't much to talk about around here now that the roses are put to bed for the winter  I thought it might be fun to contemplate something else.  How about snakes in the garden?

The only snakes we see in my part of Minnesota are the ubiquitous Garter Snakes.  I don't like them much and whenever I see one (usually around my koi pond) I reach for "Snake Away", which, incidentally, is a very good product.  I was amused to learn that, while it's 100% effective in deterring garter snakes, it is only about 50% effective in deterring rattle snakes, which caused me to think:  That's sure better than nothing, and what's the alternative?

Anyway, I'm sure the garter snakes are fully hibernated around my garden at the moment.  A friend of mine just e-mailed me the following article which I think is pretty funny.  I hope you laugh out loud (LOL) as I did.

Garter Snakes (Thamnophissirtalis), can be dangerous. Yes, grass snakes, not rattlesnakes. Here's why.

A couple in Sweetwater, Texas, had a lot of potted plants. During a recent cold spell, the wife was bringing a lot of them indoors to protect them from a possible freeze.

It turned out that a little green garden grass snake was hidden in one of the plants. When it had warmed up, it slithered out and the wife saw it go under the sofa.

She let out a very loud scream.

The husband (who was taking a shower) ran out into the living room naked to see what the problem was. She told him there was a snake under the sofa.

He got down on the floor on his hands and knees to look for it. About that time the family dog came and cold-nosed him on the behind. He thought the snake had bitten him, so he screamed and fell over on the floor.

His wife thought he had had a heart attack, so she covered him up, told him to lie still and called an ambulance.

The attendants rushed in, would not listen to his protests, loaded him on the stretcher, and started carrying him out.

About that time, the snake came out from under the sofa and the Emergency Medical Technician saw it and dropped his end of the stretcher. That's when the man broke his leg and why he is still in the hospital.

The wife still had the problem of the snake in the house, so she called on a neighbor, who volunteered to capture the snake. He armed himself with a rolled-up newspaper and began poking under the couch. Soon he decided it was gone and told the woman, who sat down on the sofa in relief.

But while relaxing, her hand dangled in between the cushions, where she felt the snake wriggling around. She screamed and fainted; the snake rushed back under the sofa.

The neighbor man, seeing her lying there passed out, tried to use CPR to revive her.

The neighbor's wife, who had just returned from shopping at the grocery store, saw her husband's mouth on the woman's mouth and slammed her husband in the back of the head with a bag of canned goods, knocking him out and cutting his scalp to a point where it needed stitches.

The noise woke the woman from her faint and she saw her neighbor lying on the floor with his wife bending over him, so she assumed that the snake had bitten him. She went to the kitchen and got a small bottle of whiskey, and began pouring it down the man's throat.

By now, the police had arrived.
 

Breathe here...

They saw the unconscious man, smelled the whiskey, and assumed that a drunken fight had occurred. They were about to arrest them all, when the women tried to explain how it all happened over a little garden snake!

The police called an ambulance, which took away the neighbour and his sobbing wife.

Now, the little snake again crawled out from under the sofa and one of the policemen drew his gun and fired at it. He missed the snake and hit the leg of the end table. The table fell over, the lamp on it shattered and, as the bulb broke, it started a fire in the drapes.

The other policeman tried to beat out the flames, and fell through the window into the yard on top of the family dog who, startled, jumped out and raced into the street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid it and smashed into the parked police car.

Meanwhile, neighbours saw the burning drapes and called in the fire department. The firemen had started raising the fire ladder when they were halfway down the street. The rising ladder tore out the overhead wires, put out the power, and disconnected the telephones in a ten-square city block area (but they did get the house fire out).

Time passed! Both men were discharged from the hospital, the house was repaired, the dog came home, the police acquired a new car and all was right with their world.

A while later they were watching TV and the weatherman announced a cold snap for that night. The wife asked her husband if he thought they should bring in their plants for the night.

And that's when he shot her. 



 

More About Voles and Castor Oil

I just finished putting about 130 gallons of mixed castor oil and water around my roses and elsewhere in the beds, where voles might burrow their way through the wood chips and mulch.  If you missed my blog post about voles and the damage they inflict on roses during the winter, check it out right here: http://theminnesotarosegardener.blogspot.com/2012/10/voles-and-roses.html

As I began mixing the castor oil (which I got at Wal-Mart @ $2.65 for a six ounce bottle), I was frustrated at how it wouldn't mix with the cold rain water from my cistern.  I put one 30 gallon batch around the roses and it was clinging to everything; my gloves, the can I mixed it in, and the sprinkling cans I was using to pour it around the roses.  Then the lights went on.  I had forgotten to put the liquid detergent in the mixing can @one teaspoon per gallon!  As soon as I did that, the castor oil dissolved perfectly and the job became much easier.

So, here again is the formula for putting castor oil around your roses:  Use one or two teaspoons of castor oil and one teaspoon of dishwashing detergent per gallon of water.  Pour (or pump) the mixture around every rose so that it can soak into the dirt or mulch a couple of inches.  I probably put around half a gallon around each rose (or a little more) and then I pour it around between the plants and around the edges of the beds, i.e. anywhere that these little chewing monsters might burrow in the wood chips and mulch.

Castor oil is cheap, so I use more rather then less of it (i.e. two teaspoons per gallon rather than one).  Note: Ten ounces of castor oil gives you approximately two teaspoons per gallon mixed in a 30 gallon trash container.

If you haven't read the article  from New Hampshire Hostas, about using castor oil to control voles, be sure to take a look at it: https://www.nhhostas.com/voles-and-mice/ .  The mixture formula is on their website as well.

This is prime time to put down castor oil.  As the ground freezes, the voles start burrowing around the beds to find the tastiest food supply for the winter: your roses!

So, don't make same the mistake I did and forget to put the liquid soap in your castor oil mixture. And good vole hunting!

The Big Coverup

Well, here in Minnesota and the northern tier of states, it's high time to be in the midst of covering our roses.  Mind you, it's not time to be finished yet, but the process should be ongoing, with an end goal in sight.

As those of you who have read my blog posts for the last few months know, I am not a believer in the "Minnesota Tip".  I tipped my roses for many years but always felt that it was not a horticulturally sound practice to partially uproot my roses and cover them with dirt in mid to late October, when many of them were still in bloom, i.e. not even close to being naturally dormant.  The longer I did it, the more my gardening instincts (not to mention my back) kept telling me I should be doing something different.  See my August blog "No Tipping Please": http://theminnesotarosegardener.blogspot.com/2012/08/no-tipping-please.html  .  As you will see in that article, my thinking has also been influenced by the fact that we have experienced climate change in the garden.  (If you are doubtful of my conclusion, see also my blog post "Climate Change in the Rose Garden": http://theminnesotarosegardener.blogspot.com/2012/06/climate-change-in-rose-garden.html

Before going any further, let's take a look at exactly what we are trying to accomplish by winter-protecting our roses.  Here in the upper-midwest, where the ground freezes solid in winter, it stands to reason that the roses freeze too.  In Minnesota, the ground freezes from several inches to several feet deep, depending on how much snow-cover insulation we get.  Obviously then, tipped roses are going to freeze just as solid as those that are left intact in the ground to go naturally dormant.  So, even though we can't stop the roses from freezing, we can try to stop them from repeatedly freezing and thawing, and that is what any method of winter protection is all about in the Upper Midwest, i.e. to keep the roses frozen until Spring.

Now there is clearly a line of demarcation where this changes, which is what makes this subject kind of confusing, depending on where you live.  In USDA Zone 6, where I was raised, and points south, the ground really doesn't consistently freeze for the whole winter, so the objective in these warmer areas would be to insulate the roses to keep them from freezing in the first place or, if you have a very cold period where they do freeze, to keep them frozen until it warms up.  Actually, I think the method I recommend, i.e. permanent wood-chip mulch, plus compost and leaves in the winter, works well in any cold climate, whether the roses consistently freeze or not.  It's just a question of how aggressively you protect.

All of my beds have at least three inches of permanent wood mulch on them.  I pull back the wood chips around the plants in the spring and summer, as I add organic fertilizer (Bob's Mix) and coffee grounds.  Then, in October, I push the wood mulch back around the plants and, for the plants that are zone 5 hardy, or more sensitive, I add several shovels of compost from my mulch pile, which is last year's shredded oak leaves and lots of Starbucks coffee grounds.  When the roses begin to go into dormancy in late October or early November, I tie them into a bundle at about the 18 inch level, using baler twine.  Finally, when the ground first freezes, which around here is usually in late November or early December, I shear off the tops of the plants with my hedge clipper, right at the 18 inch point, where they are tied.  Then I surround the plants with leaves, either by creating a cylinder of short fencing full of leaves, or by pushing a leaf bag with its bottom slit open down over the bundled plants.  I like the leaf bag method (which I learned from a Chicago-land rosarian) because it allows you to reverse the process in the spring without leaving excess leaves in the beds.  The bags can then be emptied into my mulch pile or into my bin for compost pickup (which in my case goes out to the mulch pile at the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum).

By the way, the reason for waiting until the ground freezes to put leaves around your roses, is that you run the risk of providing a habitat for voles if you put them on earlier.  See my post on voles:
http://theminnesotarosegardener.blogspot.com/2012/10/voles-and-roses.html

Again, for those who have been reading my blog, you know that I have also been hardening off my roses with six successive weeks of liquid potassium applications (see: http://theminnesotarosegardener.blogspot.com/2012/08/potassium-special-k-ration-feast-for.html .)

 So, when I finish my "Big Coverup" I am quite sure that I have done more than enough to protect my roses from the Minnesota winter.  Because I am convinced that the Twin Cities area has moved solidly into zone 5, I also leave several of my zone 5 hardy plants (i.e. "Earth Song") with only the wood mulch covering on them each year.  While they die back closer to the ground, they recover very quickly in the spring and do just as well as the plants that were more aggressively covered.  I'll be doing that again this year and will report my results in the spring.

Let me know if you have any questions, or if you have any ideas about the "Big Coverup" that you would like me to publish.  I would particularly like to hear from readers in northern Europe and Russia, as to how you winter-protect your roses.  Send an e-mail to: jack@falkerinvestments.com  .

Here are a couple of pictures of the current state of the "Big Coverup" in my beds.  Note that the roses have been mulched and tied, but not yet cut back:

Potassium Feast Follow Up

I'll be completing my sixth and final application of postassium this week.  The canes on my roses are a beautiful dark red; all hardened off for the cold weather to come.

Someone in the U.K. who read my blog raised a valid question on a garden chat site about the level of chloride (salt) being applied to the beds with Muriate of Potash and suggested that perhaps Potassium Sulfate would be a better form of potassium for the roses.  That's a good idea and I will be looking into the availability of Potassium Sulfate next year, if for no other reason to add a little sulfur to my soil.

However, in reality, the level of salts being applied with one tablespoon of Muriate of Potash per three gallons of water is quite small and well within good soil management limits.  Here is an excerpt from an e-mail I exchanged with Dr. Peter Bierman, Professor Emeritus of the University of Minnesota Soil, Water and Climate Department, in February 2011:

" I agree that winter hardiness is one of the most important functions of potassium. The rate you quoted would be about 0.1 lb K2O per plant per year. U of M recommendations for a flower garden for a soil testing low in potassium is 0.4 lb K2O per 100 sq ft., which would be close to that recommendation. So even if your soil tested high in potassium it would be a reasonable amount to apply for winter hardiness insurance and wouldn't be an excessive amount in terms of adding high salts."

Bottom Line:  The "Potassium Feast" has worked for me for 20 years without a problem and falls well within the limits of good soil management.

I would enjoy hearing from others who have tried the "Potassium Feast" this year.  E-mail me: jack@falkerinvesments.com  .

Voles!

Well, the JBs have found their way into my lawn as grubs, chewing as they went; the spider mites have hopefully gone dormant after our first hard frost here in Minneapolis; and the deer can't do too much more damage, after the roses go dormant.  So, there's nothing else to worry about except winter-protecting the roses, right?  Not!  Now it's time to start protecting the roses from winter's nastiest pest: Voles!

These voracious little rodents are also known as meadow mice, which is a much kinder name than they deserve.  What they do, if you haven't experienced them, is burrow around in the mulch and winter-cover in your rose beds and eat the bark off the roses, right down to the cambium, which, of course, girdles the canes and kills them.  It has happened to me and I had to cut all the plants in one of my beds right to the ground and, in some cases, below ground level to save them.  Thankfully all of my roses grow on their own roots, because otherwise they would not have survived.

Here are a few facts about voles from a North Carolina State University article: 

Characteristics: "Voles are small mammals, commonly called meadow mice, that live in field and shrub habitats. In the wild, voles forage on native vegetation and provide a valuable food source for predators such as weasels, hawks, and snakes. In horticultural plantings, including flower and shrub plantings and home orchards, however, voles can cause damage by eating flower bulbs, girdling the stems of woody plants, and gnawing roots. Plants not killed outright may be invaded by diseases or die from water stress during periods of drought."

Reproduction: "Female voles have a gestation period of 24 days, have an average litter size of 2.8, and produce four to six litters per year. They reach sexual maturity at 37 to 38 days and have a reproductive life span of 15 to 18 months."

That's a pretty amazing, geometric, reproduction rate so it's easy to see how they become an infestation in and around your garden, requiring yearly control, as they have in mine.

Here's the address of the NCSU article if you'd like to read more:
http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/nreos/wild/wildlife/wdc/voles2.html

And here's what voles look like:

Vole Control

Fortunately, there are several things you can do to protect your roses from voles. 

Castor Oil: This is the most effective solution I have found.  Voles really don't like castor oil; apparently, from what I have read, it makes them sick, and they avoid an area on which it has been applied.  Mix one or two teaspoons of castor oil (I use more rather than less) and one teaspoon of liquid detergent, per gallon of water, and apply it liberally around the bases of your roses and generally around your rose beds, where the voles might travel/burrow in the winter.  The best time to do this is in late Fall, when the ground is lightly frozen, just before putting your final mulch or leaf cover around your roses. Around here, that would be in mid to late-November.  I mix it in a 30-gallon trash container, pump it out with a sump pump, and apply it with a hose and watering wand, exactly like I do liquid fertilizers and potassium. You can also use a sprinkling can to apply it, if your garden isn't too big. You'll also get a good idea of how castor oil clings to anything on which it is applied if you run your hand around the inside of the trash container or sprinkling can, after you're finished.  It's still clinging to mine, after a full year of using the can to apply other mixtures.

The article below suggests using a hose-end fertilizer applicator and I think that might be a good idea.  The article describes the success a commercial hosta grower in New Hampshire has had with castor oil to protect his hosta fields.  https://www.nhhostas.com/voles-and-mice/

(P.S. There's also an interesting article about controlling slugs on hostas on his website.)

So, my immediate question, after reading the article, was: Where the heck do I get castor oil?  I did some research on-line and found that you can order large quantities of castor oil, enough to last you for many years, relatively inexpensively, but I also found that buying more than you need for one year at a time is a mistake, because castor oil has a very short shelf-life once its container has been opened.  So, the best place I have found to buy just the right quantity of castor oil is Wal-Mart, in their health and beauty area.  Look in the laxative section, because that's what it's used for and, come to think of it, that's probably why it works on the voles! 

Rodent Baits:  Killing voles is desirable, before they over-run you, but this is a touchy subject because rodent baits can also affect other animals, like neighborhood cats and dogs.  The common rodent bait that you find in most stores is an anti-coagulant poison, which, when eaten a couple of times, stays in the intestines, causes massive internal bleeding and kills the animal.  I used it in my rose beds for years, without thinking, until about five years ago when we got a new kitten and he managed to find a mouse or vole that had eaten it, in among the winter-protected roses.  I will save you the terrible details, but it resulted in a very large emergency veterinary bill to save this humane society kitty and, fortunately, he is still with us (but he used two or three of his nine lives on that one).

After that experience, I went to work researching what other non-coagulant rodent baits might be on the market, and I found one.  The brand name is "Eraze", made by Motomco, the same company that makes the anti-coagulant baits.  The active ingredient in this one is Zinc Phosphide, which is nonetheless a poison, but acts in a different way, killing small animals immediately after ingestion.  There are conflicting opinions on this, but an article by Michigan State University indicates that it is less lethal to larger animals, such as cats and dogs, because their normal reaction after ingesting it would be to regurgitate it rather than digest it.  There is no question that it would kill any animal if eaten in sufficient quantity, but it apparently is less dangerous because it kills the rodent and dissipates rather than staying in the animal as the anti-coagulant does, thus potentially transferring to another animal or predatory bird (owl or hawk) that might eat the dead or dying rodent, as we believe our kitten did.  Note that Motomco also makes a similar product labeled as mole bait that uses Zinc Phosphide, so if you can't find Eraze, you can use the mole bait (check the label to be sure).  Other companies also offer Zinc Phosphide under different brand names.

Most important is how you use the bait.  The most common way of putting it in the rose beds is to use a tin can lying on its side alongside or between the rose bushes.  The can should be covered with leaves and/or protected in other ways (such as fencing) so that neighborhood animals can't get at it.  I also use the large, black, "Tomcat" poison dispensers that are usually found in warehouses or barns.  I put a couple of bricks or heavy stones on top of each container because animals like raccoons try to get the bait out of them by tipping them on their sides.  I also put a securely anchored cylinder of  24" fencing around each container to keep other animals away.

There is another device for dispensing rodent poisons that is made of L or T-shaped PVC piping buried in the winter protective leaf and mulch cover.  This method is used extensively in the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum rose gardens and is discussed in detail in the following article from the University of Missouri.  The article also deals specifically with Zinc Phosphide as the vole bait of choice and displays a graphic of the PVC dispenser, right at the end of the article.  I will leave you with that article for your perusal:
 http://ppp.missouri.edu/newsletters/meg/archives/v14n5/v14n5.pdf

Bottom line is that in every winter I have either used rodent baits, applied castor oil, or both (as last winter), I have not had vole damage to any of my roses.  The one winter that I did nothing I had severe damage.  So, lesson learned: you need to do something to protect your roses from voles.

E-mail if you have any questions to: jfalkersr@gmail.com .