I’m sounding the alarm, or a call to arms, or whatever it takes for you to take a close look at your rose leaves! Those little green worms are here and they are hungry! If you see small irregular holes in the leaves, you know you have a problem. A small butterfly lays an egg mass on the rose plant and when those eggs hatch, you go from a mass of eggs to a mass of worms, or caterpillars if that sounds more appealing. The damage they do when feeding is fast and devastating to roses. The worm’s life span is short but their appetite is enormous! They can completely defoliate a plant in a couple of days, and although this loss of leaves doesn’t kill the rose outright, it weakens it and often these plants die in the winter. The worms are the same color green as the leaf and are always on the under side of the leaf. Spraying when they are done feeding is pointless because they are no longer there, and spraying before they hatch is ineffective because most of the chemical sprays require contact with the pest. So what I am saying is … get after them right now! If you don’t counter their attack, they will go away, and then they will come back … every worm will be another little butterfly to lay a new egg mass … poor roses don’t stand a chance without your help! I am also seeing a lot of black spot and rust in the roses this year. Black spot starts out with a black spot on the leaf and soon the leaf turns yellow and falls off. Rust shows up as orange spots on the leaf and is very unsightly. Both of these diseases as well as mildew have the same effect as the worms in weakening the plants and making them vulnerable to winter kill. OK, here’s the good news. At the greenhouse we have a ready-to-use spray that will stop all of the aforementioned problems, and it literally is ready to use. You don’t have to measure or mix … but you do have to take the time to apply the product. Spraying both top and under sides of the leaves is important, and spraying before the problem becomes major damage is also important! Right now is also the time to be pruning any form of pines. The new growth on the mugho pine is called candles, and shearing that new growth back by two-thirds or three-fourths now will not leave discolored stubs … waiting any longer will. Shearing will give the look of a dense mounded shrub that is the real look we want to see in this form of pine. If you have fruit trees, you should have already done your first spray application. I recommend a fruit tree spray that is a combination fungicide and insecticide. Well, I don’t want to sound like a chemical salesman so here are a couple of alternatives for the insects. We sell a red sphere trap to control apple maggots. These are a red ball that you coat with a sticky product called "tangle foot". The adult insect is attracted to the ball … lands there to lay its eggs … end of story! My other trap calls for a gallon milk jug into which you mix one cup of vinegar and one cup of honey … be sure the honey gets dissolved into the vinegar … add one banana peel and fill the jug full of water. Leave the lid off and hang the jug in the tree. We use three or four jugs per large tree. I am amazed at the quantity of bugs that these traps capture! The apple maggot is the hardest insect to control. The adult looks like a small housefly except that it has white stripes on its abdomen. It emerges from the ground and lays its eggs singly under the skin of an apple. The little worm that hatches eats its way around the inside of the apple, comes back out of the apple, and falls to the ground where it pupates to remerge the next year. I’ve never found one of the worms in an apple, but the evidence of their presence is disgusting! We call those brown lines "tracks". The apple maggots are particular about the type of apple they attack -… they want only the best! The traps I have just described should be out now or in the next few days. Once those pests are present, they mature, and within 10 days the damage is done. Good news is that you can get the jump on them if you do it now!