Well, right on schedule, I noticed the first rose bud of the season
this morning, a modest little puppy on my first blooming rose of the
year - Old Blush. It always beats everything else by weeks. I expect
to see hundreds of buds crop up in the next few days. For those who
want to cover a chain link fence, this is a good plant to use as it
grows fairly rapidly and densely. You'll only get one really good
flush a year, but what a flush! You *will* get some small-scale
scattered blooming the rest of the year, but nothing worth writing
home about. One thing that I did was pair it with The Fairy (Cl).
Those two two year old plants have completely covered a 25 foot long 4
foot tall section of fence. The nice thing about pairing those plants
is that The Fairy doesn't start to bloom until Old Blush starts to
fade, so you get over a couple of months of good flush (even though
it's only half and half on the fence).

Monday and Tuesday were spent feeding and doing some light pruning.
Seems like I've lost my standard (I didn't heel it in, so this should
be an object lesson, right Shiva?) The Europeana with the rose gall
doesn't look well at all, but we'll see what happens. I'm disappointed
with the way that Ingrid Bergman has weathered winter as well and I'm
thinking of moving it. I actually haven't pruned it yet though.

Otherwise, everything looks like it did OK this winter. Aloha is
really starting to leaf out and it looks like it's going to look
pretty nice this year. I'malso going to try some grub control products
in May to see if I can reduce the number of Japanese beetles. Anyone
have any experience with these products (I'm not talking about milky
spoor, but that direct granular stuff that you apply as the grubs move
toward the surface later in the season)?

BTW, regarding rose gall, I spoke to the guy at Edmunds and he says
that you shouldn't *necessarily* consider it a death sentence. First
of all, efforts to "disinfect" the soil is pretty pointless, as the
bacterium that causes the gall is present in a lot of soil anyway (I
think that this has been pointed out here on occasion). Second, he
claims that a rose can live a pretty nice existence even with the gall
and he keeps 5 or 6 such examples around (one of which he says is
quite spectacular) just to show that you don't necessarily have to
freak out if it occurs. He said that one of those roses is over 10
years old. He figures that the main thing that will happen is that it
will go into slow decline prematurely.