I Was Inviting Japanese Beetles to Flock to My Garden?

Thankfully, this is not what my roses look like yet. Right now they're glorious--full and smelling like only roses can.

But I'm living in quiet dread, because this IS what my roses looked like a little further on in the season last year. Those shiny brown things in the picture at left? Those are Japanese Beetles.

Notice that not only are there too many to count, at least five pairs of them in the picture are in the process of making more Japanese Beetles. For the past few years I never find just one Japanese Beetle in my garden, I find a plague of them.

Which is why I was so excited to learn that geraniums might be the answer to keeping them under control. I've planted oodles of geraniums in my garden this year in case they do work.

But I'm still worried. The research didn't specify how many geraniums you need per rosebush. Or how close they had to be. And what if the birds in my yard are so full from birdseed or the snails I throw out of the garden for them to find on the road that they aren't interested in eating the beetles?

So my ears still perk up when I hear of anything that might possibly be a proven solution to my plague. On twitter today I saw a post from Fine Gardening Magazine with a link to an article about Japanese Beetles and roses. This piqued my interest greatly, as Fine Gardening is a very reputable publication and the author of the article, Paul Zimmerman, looks to have some pretty serious rose cred ("Paul Zimmerman has grown thousands of roses for over 15 years and for ten of those years in a sustainable manner.") 

From that article I learned two very interesting things:

1.  "Simply shaking [Japanese beetles off your roses] and stomping on them attracts more because when killed, the female emits a pheromone that attracts males. Hardly the desired result."  

Egads, every time I crushed one of those %$@@$ bugs I was sending out a siren call for a bunch more of them to come to the wake! Argh!

2. So is there a solution "...It’s simply a spray made from cedar oil! Preferably Eastern Red Cedar. The principal is the same one used when storing sweaters in a cedar chest to keep moths away. When sprayed on the roses it keeps the beetles away and they fly off to another garden."

Eastern Red Cedar oil! Ooh, where do I get my hands on some of that?!?  (a quick Google search suggests that my neighbourhood natural/health food store is the first place to look.)

This is definitely something I will be trying out as at least some of my roses are bound to have some beetles appear (there was only so much space and budget for geraniums; I can't possibly have bought enough to render 100% coverage, even if they are the miracle cure.) 

And if I hear of any other possible solutions, I'll be sure to let you know.

What my roses look like right now. May they stay this beautiful!

Geraniums! Who knew?

Head on over to the Gardenmaking magazine blog for very exciting news on dealing with Japanese beetles. These sparkly critters have made a complete mess of my roses the past few summers. It hasn't helped that they seem to favour my favourite roses (the English roses, especially "Pat Austin.")

Bring on the zonal pelargoniums (geraniums!)

Garden Renovations in My Sleep

I don't know what other folks think about to put themselves to sleep at night, but I often pick a part of my garden I want to change and think about what would improve it.

Lately I've been obsessed with this one spot in front of the chain link fence I share with my neighbour. I've been steadily planting a series of tall and dense plants along this fence to block out my view of their garbage bins, etc. One of the last open spaces receives a fair amount of sun so I decided to put in a rose. After scouring all of the garden centers at the end of the
summer I picked what looked, from the tag, to be a dark pink edged floribunda. I checked out a description of the plant on the internet and learned it was relatively well behaved and disease resistant. Great, in it went.

Do you know what I mean when I say "hot pink"? Not bubblegum pink, Pepto-bismol pink, or little-girl pastel pink. I mean fluorescent, knock your retinas out pink. Well, it turns out that this lovely, healthy rose bears large white flowers, thickly edged in a particular shade of pink-hot pink-that I had not previously believed could be found in nature.

I suppose it wouldn't be so bad if it was surrounded by nothing but green and white, but no, of course it is positioned directly beside a very orangey-red Maltese Cross (Lychnis chalcedonica) and the clash of colours is quite something to behold.

The only good thing about this rose's colour is that I think my neighbour's daughter will like it, as I've seen her wear soccer shoes in that exact shade of pink (it looks cute on shoes, but not in my garden).

So lately, as I work at drifting off to sleep, I wrestle with this patch of garden in my mind. Do I uproot the rose and haul it off to our plant sale for someone more appreciative of its distinctive hue? Do I grow it, in hopes that it's "unique" blooms will score points with the flower show judges? Can I plant something bushy in front of it to hide it from my view, while letting it still get enough light? If I moved it, which rose would I put in its place (the lovely newer "David Austin" with the orange-toned blooms?).

It looks like it will be a long winter, so I have many more nights ahead of me to sort it out. Maybe I'll dream up a solution during one of them!