I remember years ago the father of a friends home had an oddly striped rose that had the same coloring but it was striped. The bush was at least twenty years old and failing but I thought it might be a Tiffany. Digging around the garden I found the original tag for that bush and I was correct! Sadly the gentleman that lived in the house passed away and they decided to completely re-landscape, removing the rose bushes and the wonderful orange tree in the front yard. Ah well.
To explain the striping. Variegations in flowers and leaves can usually be traced back to a virus or other variant attack. It is a non lethal virus and in many cases the bush itself retains that mutation so that cuttings taken from the original parent will keep the striping. That striped Tiffany rose bush could have been worth thousands of dollars had I the means to take cuttings and get them tested. There are other viruses that can cause issues and perhaps weaken a bush and it looked like there may have been such issues. A grower could have had the tools to isolate the mutation and a new rose would have been born.
Now then on to the goings on in the garden.
I watered this bed thoroughly after roughly leveling it. This is a good test of the drainage areas and just how unlevel the soil is. If I were to plant anything in that bed, you can see that the deeper pool end would have more water than the left side. That will be fixed should I decide to actually use that bed. One can only grow so many tomatoes and peppers.. I need to figure out what else I might want to grow. Later in the fall I can switch to leafy greens and fall veggies.
Oh, it just occurred to me that in this sandy soil one veggie would do relatively well with the addition of more sand and a little compost: potatoes and maybe carrots! Those being root crops they don't want a lot of nitrogen in their soil or food. Nitrogen produces foliage, phosphorous and potassium are for root crops. I have yet to get a test kit, when I do I will talk about the type of test and the results.
Let's talk pests in the garden. That picture is not very good unfortunately but you can see some of the leaves on this poor rose bush (variety unknown) have been chewed.
There is a wonderful insect encyclopedia that helped me learn a lot more about bugs called Garden Insects of North America by Whitney Cranshaw and David Sheltar. I came upon this book while working at the nursery and it was WELL used by everyone!
The way it was organized was types of damage insects caused. Suckers, chewers, scrapers, miners and another category I can't remember. There was an entire twenty some page just on aphids!
Anyway, you can tell whether chewing damage is caused by a mollusk (snails/slugs) or caterpillars/worms/larvae or grasshoppers/katydids. You see how I divided that up?
Snails and slugs are known scientifically as gastropods = gastro meaning stomach and pod meaning food, stomach foot feeding mollusk. They have no jaw or real teeth or mandible so they eat as they slide around on the ground or on leaves. They are part of the clean up crew of the garden (more on that later) and as such eat what they walk on. Snail and slug damage on leaves is usually in the middle of the leaf and if you look closely can sometimes see where their mouth foot scraped the leaf around the edges of the holes. This is not always the culprit but again I will get to that. Typically it's larger holes rather than small pinpricks.
The damage on the rose above is caused by a larvae, not a caterpillar. It is the larvae of a particular tiny fly called a sawfly and the larvae are called 'rose slug' because that's what it looks like. The larva stage of that insect is a small green caterpillar type that is the exact same color as the leaf and is usually on the underside of the leaves. The damage from this one starts as small pinprick holes and eventually as they larvae gets bigger so do the holes.
So you can see that holes start as small windowpanes scraped into the back of the leaf then as the bug continues to grow creates bigger holes. Now how do you take care of the little marauders? There is luckily a very good organic spray out there from various companies called spinosad. The primary market name is Captain Jack's Deadbug Brew though it is likely marketed by other companies as well. Wonderful stuff! If your leaves have turned to lace, cut them off, they aren't doing the plant any good. If you think BT (bacillus thuringensis) will work, put it away or don't buy it for that purpose. That is only for true caterpillars of moths and butterflies.
Not every green caterpillar you see on a plant is bad. Whaat? That's right, there is actually a beneficial fly that lays it's eggs on plants that have a surplus of aphids called a syrphid fly.
They are very small and can be confused with a bee but despite the pointy butt, the eyes have it and it is definitely a fly. The difference in the larva is syrphid are opaque and the sawfly are more translucent. Once I learned about these little guys whenever I would see them hovering around (another name for them is Hover Fly and they are minor pollinators as well) I would egg them on, 'go lay your eggs and get those aphids!'.
So you see I always look for beneficials first before reaching for the bug spray. If the population of the pests gets too high I will step in if I don't see any beneficials around. Some damage is to be expected, we're dealing with open air gardens after all.
Another uneducated question from customers, 'is there any kind of insect repellent for plants?' Short and only answer is NO. There were also the 'I don't want to kill them just want them to go away.' you can wish all you want but it ain't going to happen if you want perfectly pristine plants. Nature is imperfect and has a balance when left to it's own devices. It's only the whim of man that has decided to impose perfection on an imperfect system.
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