Mistakes!

It's important for my readers to know that many of the things I talk about in these pages were learned by trial and error; a lot of errors!

For example, in a non-rosy matter this summer, I asked a commercial sprayer, who was spraying fungicide on my neighbor's flowering crabs, to also spray my Harrelson-Red apple tree.  He told me he was spraying a systemic and stated the chemical name which sounded vaguely familiar, but it didn't register with me and I didn't check it out.  Unfortunately, I later found out that what he sprayed was the systemic fungicide Banner-Maxx, which I use as a systemic blackspot inhibitor on my roses, along with Manzate.  Banner-Maxx is labeled only for fruit trees that will not be used for human consumption and there are now hundreds of beautiful apples on that tree that I will have to throw away this fall.  I really should have known better, but I won't make that mistake again, for sure.  To make matters worse, that boner cost me ten bucks!

I also just learned something else in the last week about my roses, which have been absolutely beautiful all summer.  I started seeing lots of shiny leaves, like something sticky had been sprayed on the plants.  After a little checking around, I discovered that what I was seeing was "honeydew", the sticky excretion of thousands of aphids that had infested several of my beds.  I  haven't seen aphids in any quantity in my beds for years and that really started me scratching my head.  I have always cultivated beneficial wasps and flies in my gardens that feast on a variety of insects, especially aphids, so what changed?  Where did the beneficials go and why this infestation?  I immediately water-washed the plants with my bug blaster and sprayed with insecticidal soap, and then with a combination of apple cider vinegar and Castile soap, which killed a bunch of aphids, but not nearly enough to keep up with the supply that was attacking my plants.  After a few days the plants were looking really stressed and today I cut off lots of new growth that was starting to die back.  Tomorrow, I will be spraying with imidacloprid, which I know will take them down immediately, but I really hadn't wanted to do that this year, because of its potential effect on bees

I immediately suspected that I had made another foolish mistake and I read everything I could find on the internet about aphid infestations.  What I discovered is that by over-spraying certain insecticides, such as acephates (like Orthene)and pyrethroids (like Demand CS) you can kill off all the beneficial insects, which then gives rise to aphid infestation.  And I really had no idea what aphids would do to the roses, once they are uncontrolled by beneficial insects.

Those of you who have followed my blogs for the last year or so know that I have been successfully experimenting with the pyrethroid Lambda Cyhalothrin (Demand CS) for controlling Japanese Beetles.  Since it is also labelled for spider mites, I thought that I could make it do double duty with both spider mites and JBs. Mistake! I ended up overusing it this summer and, to make matters worse, since it is labeled for aphids, I used it again to try and wipe out the aphid infestation, which failed completely and the infestation just got worse.

So by making this seemingly foolish mistake, I have learned the limitations of overusing a pyrethroid, which has a very important application in controlling JBs and which I want to be able to use in the future.  The lesson is to use it very sparingly and only when a true JB infestation occurs, which we really haven't seen this summer.  (Picking the beetles by hand and drowning them in soapy water is still the preferable way to control JBs and I must admit I just got lazy on that front this summer, in favor of spraying Demand CS, which works so well.

The other thing I learned is that the combination of Castile soap and apple cider Vinegar controls aphids, although not enough to forestall an infestation.  I had given up on it earlier this summer when it didn't work on thrips but, since I wasn't seeing aphids at that time, I didn't realize that it was working to hold them down.  I will definitely return to this very benign approach toward aphid control, as soon as I achieve a "knock-down" to save my beds.  Here's my post on Castile soap:
 http://jack-rosarian.blogspot.com/2013/03/got-castile-soap.html

So, another valuable lesson learned.  But remember that if you aren't trying new things and, yes, making a few mistakes, you will never learn how things should best be done.  In that regard, you can make an educated guess that many of the things I discuss in these pages have been learned and perfected by making mistakes.

Jack Falker
09-05-2013

The "Minnesota Rose Gardener's" Rose Gardens

I thought the "proof of the pudding" of the "Minnesota Rose Gardener" blog would be to show all of my rose gardens at their peak in mid-August.  So here they all are, with comments on each:

 This is my main Earth Song bed.  Earth Song is our favorite rose; very disease-resistant, winter-hardy, fragrant, and beautiful, and makes a long-lasting cut flower.  It's also one of Griffith Buck's only Grandifloras, so it's especially good as an exhibition rose.  Incidentally, I propagated all the roses in this bed from air layers and stem cuttings.

The bed in the background is temporary, for this summer only, and takes the place of a 5,000 gallon koi pond that we removed this spring.  I wanted to do something with the 14 cubic yards of good black dirt that we poured in the hole, so I bought about 10 packs of zinnia and cosmo seeds, plus the cleome aleady coming up in other parts of my garden, and spread them all around. It was a really big transplanting and thinning job, but it's really beautiful right now.  More on that bed later, because my Morden Centennials are hiding behind all of those annuals.

This bed is in the front of my house on the northeast corner and includes Buck Earth Songs in the foreground and Buck Carefree Beauties in the rest of the bed.  The Earth Song in the foreground (a very big plant) is the parent of most of the other Earth Songs in my garden.

This is the other end of the front Carefree Beauty/Earth Song Bed, with Carefree Beauty in the foreground. These roses are upwards of twenty years old.

These are four Earth Songs at the front, southeast corner of our house, right by the garage.  Did I mention that we love this rose?

These are the Morden Centennials behind the area where the koi pond was.  They have a few nice peony plants mixed-in for spring color.  To the left are the temporary cleome, zinnias and cosmos.  My mom called the cleome "spider plants".  As anyone who grows them knows, once you plant cleome/spider plants, they seed themselves exponentially every year.  If they weren't so pretty, we'd probably call them invasive weeds! I usually let them grow around my mulch pile as a barrier.  The down side of that is they pop up the next year everywhere you spread the mulch, including the rose beds.  Fortunately, they're easy to pull.  :)

Here's another view of our Morden Centennials, which shows the electric deer-fence behind the garden. The back of our yard is in the watershed of Nine Mile Creek, which flows into the Minnesota River and thence to the Mississippi (as does just about everything in Minneapolis).  Accordingly, we have a large herd of deer that lives along the creek wetlands behind us; and, of course, their favorite food is roses.  The electric fence is baited every night with aluminum-foil strips smeared with both peanut butter and a deer attractant. Licking the fence really gets their attention.  It uses a standard, farm, cattle/horse fence controller and is called the "Minnesota Deer Trick".

This bed is on the North end of our yard and features two Robustas and a big raspberry patch, which belongs to our granddaughter Cosette.  This is Japanese Beetle heaven at this time of year.  Here's a little picture of a pretty, single Robusta:

These are two terraced beds at the back of our house, behind our three-season porch/deck.  They include Buck Earth Song, Folksinger, Prairie Harvest, Honey Sweet, Paloma Blanca, Hawkeye Belle and Prairie Star, as well as Morden Blush, Winnipeg Parks and, last but not least, Dr. David Zlesak's gorgeous, yellow, "Number 7" (which we are very privileged to grow).

And now, finally, here's the old "Minnesota Rose Gardener" himself.  Photo credit to Mary Eileen, my sweet wife of 49 years, who puts up with a lot and is absolutely the best dead-header in all of Minnesota!
(Yes, I'm sitting on the sweet alyssum, but who cares!)    :)


Jack Falker
August 15, 2013

Mind Your pH!

Do you know the right pH for growing roses?  And do you know the pH of your soil right now?  If not, you're flying blind and you're eventually going to have problems; just like I did a few years ago, when virtually all of my roses in two beds stopped growing after their initial spring bloom.   I knew something was wrong when pouring on high-nitrogen Miracle-Gro had no effect. The roses acted like they didn't even know it was there; and that's about right because they couldn't "feel" its effect.  I found out later that the pH in those beds was way too high (about 7.5) and that I made it that way through an unfortunate series of organic gardening mistakes, the biggest of which was using way too much horse and cow manure; a condition I'm still trying to fully correct.  More about that later.

The measurement of relative acidity or alkalinity of soil is its pH, where neutral is a pH of 7.0, which is the pH of distilled water.  A pH below 7.0 means that soil is acidic and above 7.0 means it's alkaline.  Roses need a fairly acidic condition and if they don't have it they simply stop growing (just like mine did), because they can't absorb nutrients; plus they develop an iron deficiency, which I could definitely see in mine.

Consulting my collection of rose books on the subject of pH, they all say about the same thing:  that the ideal pH range for roses is between 6.0 and 6.8 (a mid-point of 6.4).  However, exchanging e-mails with Dr. Peter Bierman, retired Professor of Soil, Water and Climate at the University of Minnesota, after an excellent presentation he made to the Twin Cities Rose Club (TCRC) in February 2011, he concluded: "Because many roses are susceptible to iron deficiency at high pH, I think I'll stick with the range of 5.5 to 6.5." That's a mid-point of 6.0 and I like Dr. Bierman's slightly more acidic conclusion, based on my experience.  So,that's all you need to know about the right pH for growing roses; just memorize it and head out to recess!

Now, how do you find out the pH of your soil?  Well, one way to do it is to take a soil sample and send it to a soil measurement laboratory.  Around here, that would be the University of Minnesota Extension Service. The problem with that, however, is that you will only find out the pH of one or two spots in your garden.  What you really need to know is the pH of your soil in many spots in your garden, preferably at the bases of several roses in each bed.  The only way to do that is to own an inexpensive pH meter and make it one of the most important tools in your garden.  (Forget about using litmus paper pH measuring strips; they're not accurate enough and hard to use).   Rosemania.com offers several pH meters; I use their most inexpensive model and it works fine. Here's the address of that page on Rosemania’s website:

 http://rosemania.com/shopsite_sc/store/html/page17.html .

When using a pH meter you must first wet the soil you are measuring with distilled water, which has a neutral pH.  This is important, because you don't want your measurement of your soil to be influenced by the pH of the tap water.

Can you tell from the scratches on my Kelway pH meter, above, that it gets used a lot?

So, how do you control pH in your garden to keep it in that 6.0 range for your roses?  Well, the first thing is not to put alkaline composts, like animal manures, on your garden unless you supplement them with something acidic, like peat.  As mentioned above, I learned this the hard way.  I grew up in a rose garden and, whenever we visited my uncle's dairy farm, my dad always brought home a couple of 5 gallon buckets of rotted cow manure for his rose beds.  In retrospect, that small amount of manure would not have elevated his pH, but I thought that if my dad had beautiful roses using manure, more would be better for me.  So I set out to get trailer loads of horse and cow manure every year and I spread all that poop liberally on my beds, especially when I mounded my roses for winter.  Well, that, of course, was a mistake, as I mentioned above, when my pH went up to an unsustainable level of 7.5.  I subsequently learned from a very knowledgeable dairy farmer in Wisconsin, who sells composted cow manure (Cowsmo), that his pH is 7.3 and he advised me not to use it without peat to bring its pH down.  That's when the light went on.  My organic fertilizing was doing more harm than good!

In that regard, we recently had several organic fertilizer vendors come to a TCRC meeting to talk about their wares.  One of them was selling little bags of "Alpaca Pearls", i.e. alpaca poop, from their farm.  Knowing that animal fertilizers have high pH, I asked if they knew the pH of their product.  They did not but, to their credit, they subsequently had it measured and reported back that it is 8.3!  So Alpaca Pearls turns out to be the wrong thing to put on your roses, along with other animal manures.

I have learned from all this that green, organic manure, like coffee grounds, is the right thing to use on your roses.  Coffee has a perfect pH for roses of 6.2, has a decent nitrogen content, and is a perfect medium for nurturing worms and their castings (poop) around your roses.  See my two recent posts about using coffee grounds in the garden: http://jack-rosarian.blogspot.com/2013/03/coffee-grounds-and-roses.html and http://jack-rosarian.blogspot.com/2013/05/gettin-wormy.html

So what should you do if your roses won't grow and you find out, like I did, that your pH is too high?  Well, first, get started and be consistent with the coffee grounds, but that won't be enough to make a quick correction.  Here's a quote from a University of Minnesota paper on the subject by Dr. Bierman:  "Elemental sulfur is the most commonly used material to lower soil pH.... Iron sulfate also lowers soil pH and it acts much more rapidly than elemental sulfur (2 to 3 weeks vs. 3 to 4 months)."  Dr.  Bierman also points out that elevated pH drains roses of iron, so using iron sulfate to lower your pH also provides a needed dose of iron.

I use both elemental sulfur and iron sulfate in my garden.  Garden sulfur is available around here, inexpensively, in 25 pound bags, at Mills Fleet Farm, and iron sulfate is available in 50 pound bags at Waconia Farm Supply.  We have lots of farm stores in Minnesota, which is nice for serious gardeners, but you may have to look around a bit more in other areas.  Suburban garden centers sell these products in small containers at ridiculous prices, so I advise finding a farm store and doing the necessary driving to get there.

I have also found that using acidic Miracle-Gro or Schultz fertilizers, labeled for azaleas and rhododendrons, helps with the pH lowering process, in that, while you are treating the underlying problem with sulfur or iron sulfate, your roses will start absorbing nitrogen administered with a dose of acidity. As a matter of fact, unless your pH is under 6.0 already, a dose of acidic liquid fertilizer on your roses in the spring would be a good idea.  It's what I do with my beds.

I haven't mentioned the potential need to increase soil pH because it generally is not an issue with roses.  However, if for some reason your pH is below 5.5, repeated doses of limestone (lime) will increase pH back into the 6.0 range, over time.  But, be careful you don’t elevate it above 6.5 in the process.

Just before publishing this post, I measured the pH at the base of several plants in my Earth Song bed, which still had elevated pH last summer.  I had treated it with iron sulfate last year and put a good dose of elemental sulfur around each plant when I winter-protected the plants last fall.  To my pleasant surprise, the pH has dropped to 6.0 through the whole bed! And, of course, the roses are performing better than they have in quite some time.

Minding your pH is one of the most important things you can do to raise healthy roses.  I suggest that rose clubs should own a couple of pH meters and loan them out to members.  In addition, consulting rosarians should consider providing pH measurements to members, either with the club’s meters or their own.

Jack Falker

June 20, 2013

Gettin' Wormy

At the April meeting of the Twin Cities Rose Club,  we had a presentation by a local vermiculture farmer offering worm castings (worm poop) as rose fertilizer.  It was five bucks for a cute little five pound bag, which wouldn't seem to go too far in a garden with 100 plus roses.  So, it's pretty expensive fertilizer, especially given the fact you can make all the worm poop you'd ever need for free, if you work at it a little bit.  Nevertheless, folks walked out with multiple bags of worm castings in their arms.  It reminded me of the old saw: "Selling Ice to Eskimos".  Lots of Eskimo rosarians here in Minnesota!

If you have an active mulch pile, you have worms pooping for you every day.  All you have to do is put it on your roses (that's what the mulch is for).  And, if you follow the advice in my last blog, "Coffee Grounds and Roses" you'll have more worm poop than you'll know what to do with. In fact, at a buck a pound I may put some up in a cute little bag of my own for the next TCRC Eskimo meeting.

Here's a quote from that blog:

“What makes coffee grounds so wonderful in the garden anyway?  Earthworms love them.  They make a decent fertilizer.  You can use them as mulch or as a green ingredient in the compost pile….  Organic gardeners know that earthworms are essential to a healthy garden.  When it comes to improving soil structure and water-holding capacity, earthworms can’t be beat….  While earthworms will eat most any organic matter, coffee grounds are like earthworm candy.”
(From The American Rose “A Cuppa Joe”, by Paulette Mouchet)

And here's the address of that blog, in case you missed it:

http://jack-rosarian.blogspot.com/2013/03/coffee-grounds-and-roses.html

I compost with coffee grounds and shredded oak leaves, all of which goes on my roses over the summer and especially in the fall, when I mound my roses for the winter.  All of that works its way down in the ground in the spring, complete with worms to poop at will around every rose.  In economics and finance, we would call that the "multiplier effect".  Here's a recent picture of my mulch pile this spring with about 500 pounds of Starbucks' finest sitting right in the middle. (Can you just imagine the market value of all those lattes?)  After I took this picture, I took my rake and covered the grounds with shredded oak leaves that have been composting under the snow all winter, just before it started raining today.  That ought to get the worms pooping in style!  Little bag of worm poop anyone?

Coffee Grounds and Roses

One of the best kept secrets in rose gardening is coffee grounds.  Most people know they’re good compost, but have no idea of what they’ll do for the soil in your rose garden.

In the March/April 2011 issue of the American Rose there was an excellent article called “A Cuppa Joe”, by Paulette Mouchet of Acton, California, which was the best explanation of using grounds in the garden I've seen.  Here is an excerpt:

“What makes coffee grounds so wonderful in the garden anyway?  Earthworms love them.  They make a decent fertilizer.  You can use them as mulch or as a green ingredient in the compost pile….  Organic gardeners know that earthworms are essential to a healthy garden.  When it comes to improving soil structure and water-holding capacity, earthworms can’t be beat….  While earthworms will eat most any organic matter, coffee grounds are like earthworm candy.”

But here’s the best part for rosarians.  The article goes on to say that Sunset magazine sent a batch of Starbucks coffee grounds to a soil and plant laboratory in Washington State for analysis.  Turns out that the pH of Starbucks grounds is a slightly acidic 6.2, which is right in the middle of the pH range we’re shooting for in growing roses. And that’s not all: they’re also a slow-release fertilizer with 2.28% nitrogen, .06% phosphorus and .6% potassium.

The trick in using coffee grounds is getting hold of a lot of them.  Unless you only have one or two roses in your garden, the grounds from your home coffee maker just won’t cut it.  Fortunately, that’s not a problem.  Starbucks has a policy to recycle their coffee grounds, whenever they can.  So you can walk into any Starbucks, get a really good cup of Joe, ask whether they have any grounds available for your garden, and walk out with a 30-pound bag of fresh grounds.  I recommend going around mid-morning, because they’re just past their biggest rush of the day, have a lot of fresh grounds all bagged up, and aren’t too busy to pack them up for you.  Once the Starbucks folks know you want them, they’re happy to give them to you.  To put this in perspective, I have put several hundred pounds of grounds in my mulch pile over the winter.  That mulch will be going on my roses all summer and when I mound my roses for winter protection in the fall, a substantial proportion of the mulch I use will be composted coffee grounds.

I also use fresh grounds as part of my regular fertilizing regimen.  I mix the Twin Cities Rose Club's great organic “Bob’s Mix” fertilizer with wet, fresh grounds, right out of the bag, in a 50/50 ratio, putting about two or three big scoops of the fertilizer-grounds mixture on every plant.  One other benefit:  It makes “Bob’s Mix” smell better!  And the roses love it.

There’s more in the “American Rose” article, as well, such as how coffee grounds repel slugs.  I put them directly into my hosta bed last summer and didn't see any more slugs, so I think that works too.  In short, coffee grounds are an excellent all-around component in an organic gardening regimen and they are very available to all gardeners, so it’s a real shame to see them go into the trash.

Springtime is a great time to get started putting coffee grounds in your mulch pile and directly on your plants as they're getting started for the season.  So get on down to your local coffee shop, tell them you're a rose gardener and ask them for a big bag of grounds.  Your roses will act like they're highly caffeinated!

Jack Falker

March 17, 2013

Roses in Winter

The Lake Harriet Rose Garden is on the shore of one of our four beautiful lakes in Minneapolis (which means "City of Lakes").  Sunday, March 3rd was a beautiful sunny day, right at about 32 degrees Fahrenheit, so I put on my sunscreen and took a stroll through the rose garden and out onto the ice.  The lake and garden are about five miles from my house and about four miles from downtown Minneapolis in a very nice residential area known as South Minneapolis. Here's how it looks in Minneapolis at the beginning of March.

Here's the entrance to the garden.

Looking across the garden out toward the lake

The garden is using construction blankets to cover the beds for the first time this year.  They have always used mulch and leaves.

High Noon!

The garden sundial is one of my favorite places in the garden.  I take it's advice at this time of  year!

Out on the ice looking back at the bandshell and the Minneapolis skyline.  Downtown is about four miles to the northeast.

A family on the ice with their dogs.  The ice is about two feet thick and perfectly safe for walking around, fishing or whatever.

A nordic skier enjoying the sunshine.  The rose garden is on the far shore.

Here's the inside of the band-shell looking out at the lake.  We have great band concerts and lots of other interesting things here in the summer.

Hundreds of people were out running, walking, skiing, bike riding and generally enjoying themselves in the sun on this beautiful Sunday afternoon.

Got Castile Soap?

After publishing my last post on spraying non-toxic stuff, instead of the usual fungicides and pesticides, I was reminded by my good friends, Diane and Dick Lawson that they are spraying almost exclusively Castile soap on their garden (which is one of the nicest in the Twin Cities).
Here's the address of my last post:  http://theminnesotarosegardener.blogspot.com/2013/02/hazardous-roses-3-spray-nothing-toxic.html

I asked Diane, a recently retired high school physics teacher, to explain exactly what Castile soap is vs. the liquid dishwashing soap I've been using and was recommending in my article.  I was surprised when Diane told me that Castile soap is made primarily from olive and other vegetable oils, which presumably leave a beneficial coating on the plants, vs. detergent soap.  In other words, Castile soap is a natural surfactant that remains on the surface of the leaves, much as a surfactant fungicide might, as well as acting as a deterrent to insects.

I remember using Diane and Dick's Castile formula on my garden a few years ago and that was the summer I saw virtually no thrips or aphids.  Diane would contend that's the case in her garden every year.

Until now, my problem with using Castile soap has been the laborious preparation.  They use "Kirk's" Castile soap in bars, which has to be dissolved in water and then mixed into your sprayer.  Their procedure is to dissolve half a bar of Kirk's in a gallon of water and then mix one cup of that soap mixture into each gallon of spray mixture.  For example, for five gallons of soap spray, you would use five cups of the Kirk's/water mixture.

After talking to Diane the other night and remembering that I didn't enjoy dissolving bars of soap in water, I "Googled" Castile soap to better understand it and here is what I found:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castile_soap (which includes a picture of a bar of Kirk's).

I also found this story about making your own Castile insecticidal soap: http://www.ehow.com/how_5791479_use-dr_-bronners-insecticidal-soap.html

If you Google: "Castile soap insecticide" you will find several other articles, as well

I also found that Target sells Dr. Bronner's Castile soap in liquid form, so that means you don't have to dissolve bars of soap in water to use it.  Here is the Target shopping site for Castile soap:
http://www.target.com/p/dr-bronner-s-pure-castile-soap-lavender-32-oz/-/A-10770138?reco=Rec|pdp|10770138|TargetClickEV|item_page.vertical_1&lnk=Rec|pdp|TargetClickEV|item_page.vertical_1

I enlarged the label of Dr. Bronner's Castile Soap and here are the ingredients: Organic coconut and olive oils, organic hemp oil, organic jojoba oil, lavandin extract, organic lavender oil, citric acid, and vitamin E.  Now that sounds like something I wouldn't mind spraying on my roses and, if I happen to get some on me, I'll just lather up and wash it off!

I believe that adding baking soda to the Castile soap mixture at a rate of 3 TBP per gallon would probably make it a better fungicide, as well.

You could also substitute 2 TBP of Castile soap for the dishwashing detergent in the cider vinegar/aspirin, soap mixture I recommended in my last post: http://jack-rosarian.blogspot.com/2013/02/hazardous-roses-3-spray-nothing-toxic.html .

As soon as this year's new growth starts around here, I plan on spraying a Castile soap mixture early-on, and I'll let you know how it works.

Jack Falker (jack@falkerinvestments.com)
03.01.2013