Transplanting roses in the ‘wrong’ season

We are moving from one home to another this summer. We have a rose bush in our garden that was a gift for a special occasion that we planted about three years ago, and we’d like to take it with us. Is it possible to transplant a rose bush? It’s not very large, but it has a few blooms on it now.

The best times to transplant roses are in early spring or in the fall, but if, for whatever reason, mid-summer is when you have to do it, then give it the best care possible. Here is advice from Marty Reich, a consulting rosarian with the Nashville Rose Society and American Rose Society:

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Spider mites can ruin your roses

What could be stripping the leaves off the branches of my roses? I spray with a product that is supposed to protect roses from insects and diseases, but it hasn’t helped.

Keep an eye on roses when it’s hot and dry. That’s when spider mites do their worst damage, say rosarians at the Nashville Rose Society, and they can turn a lovely rose bush into an ugly mess.

The tiny creatures get on the undersides of leaves and feed on the plant’s juices. The damaged leaves look speckled, turn yellow and fall off.

Spider mites are not insects; they are more closely related to spiders, so insecticides won’t have any effect. You can use a miticide, but it can be expensive. The best and cheapest way to control them is with a blast of water directed at the undersides of the leaves, rosarians say. If you do this every three days for a week or so, you break the mites’ gestation cycle.

Here’s a little more information about the tiny arachnids: Adult mites are less than 1/50 inch long. They use their mouthparts to pierce individual plant cells and remove the liquid. They produce webs that can coat the foliage with a fine silk that collects dust, making the leaves look dirty.

You can’t see them, but you can certainly see the damage. Heavily infested plants will be discolored, and if they are not controlled, the rose can be stunted, or even killed.

A sticky hackberry situation

QUESTION: We have a question regarding one of our large hackberry trees. It’s covered with little white flying bugs and the leaves have a sticky residue. What causes this and is there something that we can do about it?

Asian wooly hackberry aphids are a nuisance, but won’t harm the trees.

The bugs you are seeing are called Asian wooly hackberry aphids, and they seem to make an appearance about this time every year. They feed exclusively on hackberry trees, and like all aphids, they feed by piercing the leaves and extracting the juice. The sticky residue is what they excrete after feeding on the leaves, a substance called honeydew. Another byproduct you may notice is a black mold that grows on the honeydew, which is called sooty mold.The aphids apparently do not do enough damage to harm the tree, they are just a nuisance, mostly in late summer and early fall when their population grows due to the many generations that have been produced. If it’s a nuisance you can’t tolerate for some reason, there is a systemic insecticide product that is said to be effective in controlling aphids, but it would not do anything to solve this year’s population. There are several brands available, but the main ingredient is a chemical called imidacloprid, and it should be applied to the ground around the tree in early spring, where it will be taken up via the tree’s vascular system into the leaves.

Not much, then, can be done about this year’s population of hackberry aphids. Hose off the cars, the deck, the lawn furniture and anything under the trees that are sticky from the honeydew, and take comfort in the knowledge that they are a temporary annoyance, and will be gone in a few weeks.

Tomatoes: How late is too late?

QUESTION: I have some tomato transplants from spring that have not been planted. They are tall and skinny, but still look healthy. Is it too late to plant them now?

Ideally, healthy tomato transplants should be planted in mid to late April or early May (or after the last frost date in your area). To wait until late June to get the transplants in the ground is asking for trouble, but if you have the space to plant and the time to coddle them through the summer heat, you might as well try. Plant them deep, or dig a trench and lay the stem on its side with the leaves at the top of the stem above the soil. Provide a dose of water-soluble fertilizer, water them well and keep the soil moist.

Planting in the heat of summer, you are likely to encounter problems with insects, slower growth, delayed blooming and soil that dries out too quickly for the young plants to grow well. But if the plants pull through the worst of it, you may be rewarded with a small crop of fall tomatoes.

If you’re late to start a garden this year and still want to have home-grown vegetables and herbs, consider these quick-start choices that should come up right away from seed: cucumbers, bush beans, summer squash, beets, carrots, scallions, basil, dill. Keep the bed moist after you sow.

And look ahead to fall when you can plant lettuce, turnip and mustard greens, cabbage, spinach, kale, and other favorite cool-season vegetables.