Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and today I want to answer a question
I get pretty frequently from my viewers which is: "What's eating my roses?" and because
that question can mean a lot of different things I'm going to try to address a wide
range of the pests and damage that you can see particularly in my local climate
a northern temperate climate and the kinds of pests that'll see here that may be kind
of similar or very different in your own local climate so let's just start with the broadest
scale of damage which is if you came and found the whole top edge of all of your roses we're
just chewed right off all the flower beds and everything else well if you're if you're a
climate like mine and if you seen deer around at all dear are probably your problem now
if you saw the similar damage but you saw it down low he saw that there was devastating
chewing damage and that your roses were chewed to nubs especially early in spring when they're
sending a send up fresh new shoots chances are in that case that it's rabbits instead
and so those are the 2 biggest before damage that I can think of that you would see on
rose's fairly commonly but let's get down to the more new wants damage and I'm gonna
talk about leaf damage next now there's a diagnostic here that I would know in my climb
and there's really only 3 tests that I see pretty commonly one of which is of little
concern I could and very easy to diagnose it's a leaf cutting be and what you'll see
in this cases you'll see that the leaves have these very neat very tidy rounded notches
from the outside the leaf very distinctive you're not going to mistake it for any other
kind of damage that is just a flying insect to be that chews up those leaves and goes
away it doesn't tend in my area to cause too much lasting damage occurs scattered all over
the garden and there's little you can do to prevent it there's not anything you can really
do to stop those bees from coming around and taking notches of your leaves. So I'm hoping
in this case it just set your mind at ease that it's nothing serious and you shouldn't
have to worry about too much now let's look at the damage and the signs of one of the
ones that causes me a bit of grief which is the rose slug sawfly. Let's look at the signs
of the damage and see what we can figure out about what's causing it so first of all look
at the section here big chunks taken out from the end of this leaf but in other places the
biting damage not going all the way through and in fact when I pull off the sleeve here
which you can see is pretty badly damaged if you look at the next one down zoom in a
little more. And see the damage on this one has just kind of a scraping or chewing from
underneath it didn't get all the way through for the most part because he got a little
bit more through down here so I'm from telling the story I think that there was a past that
was smaller at this stage and it was only able to bite part way through the leaf and
then as it got larger and progressed up to the tip and use your parts of the plant he
was able to get all the way through the leaf and then as a final sign here you look at
the next layer of foliage down and see if I can zoom in on that and focus because what
you're gonna see here. Right down here is these little speckles these little dots of
black that is for us. And there's another side of it there on this leaf and not fret
as means that something was chewing and improving let's see if we can catch were bad guys in
the act here have that skill sanitization on the front side of the leaf here looks like
it's been chewed but maybe not all the way through. End. Hope you can see on the backside
of the leaf here. Who the culprit is there it's a guy called arose slugs sawfly. This
one. No start download now you see that France again. Moving upwards you can see some of
the damage and I think even additional frost down there let's see if we can catch this
guy in the act. C. O. there we are. And that is the much larger larvae now moved further
up towards the juicy tip of the plant in is now choosing a big hole in the leaf. Okay
so now that you know what you're looking for in sawfly in the rose slugs sawfly larvae
the question becomes how do you control it what do you do about it and it can actually
cause a fair amount of damage if they move in any large numbers I have to say that if
you balance the kinds of plantings around your garden this is something I know that
I've had before if you have lots of different kinds of plants and you mix all of them all
around you'll end up with kind of a balanced population of predators the predators do you
eat the sawfly larvae so it does tend to keep them under control and very rarely see a large
scale outbreak on my roses here even though I grow roses and fairly large numbers and
it's because I do companion planting with things from the daisy family things from the
mustard family all sorts of flowering ornament ornamentals from different families of plants
it tends to bring up those beneficial insect populations now if you do not have to knock
them down here's the interesting thing to know about sawfly is that it's not a fly and
it's not a caterpillar so none of the B. T. solutions will help you with this it is actually
a bee or a wasp or in that same group is bees or wasps so the kind of thing that you have
to do they're they're fairly easy to I I showed you how to find them on your plant so once
you found the area that they're in they're fairly easy to wipe out with something like
just basic insecticidal soap does a good job on them and I don't use anything harder than
that because as I say all my beneficial insects are doing a good job of keeping the pest population
down both for them and for aphids and for everything else so I really don't want to
spray anything that's going to knock down my beneficial insects so I I just use a targeted
spray of insecticidal soap and it seems to get rid of the sawfly larvae or you know if
you wanna be really low tech about it if you find a problem squish him remove those leaves
no big deal. So the third kind of damage hearing to deal with this one through kind of the
process of elimination it is not rounded notching at the edges of leave so I don't think it's
leaf cutter bee it appears to have just a single zone of damage it doesn't have any
of that telltale frost on the leaves below it it doesn't have any of that. That sort
of scraping damage or sort of previous skills in aviation damage of the leaf. Around it
and it doesn't progressively get worse towards the top of the plant in fact there's no damage
further up it's rather down low just by process of elimination and knowing my pasts locally
I suspect that this is just snail damage so we've covered wide scale damage under the
top of your plants or to the bottom of it the the the big urban core damage we've covered
3 different kinds of past that you'll find chewing up the leaves of your roses but what
if it is an insect past that is eating the flowers of your roses and the most common
one there is called budworm now bloodworms nada worm but worms a caterpillar but it and
it's not very common in my area I haven't seen it here I'm I haven't seen any of my
roses ever but I do get sent pictures of this pretty frequently by people who have seen
you know see rear insect damage on the buds of their roses and budworm I'm going to insert
some pictures here from Google but as it being a caterpillar and it can you know can decimate
the the bugs of your roses the flowers and destroy them if you want to try to handle
those ones happily for pests in that family the caterpillar family you can use a a natural
remedy called B. T. K. he now when you say about B. T. which is sort of a biological
control of insect pests you have to choose the right suffix letter beats he K. is for
caterpillar's BCI is for flies and things B. T. G. that's for Beatles those last letters
purchase it basically means that it's a strain the selected to really only attack insects
of that particular kind so is again with the caterpillars use beats he K. and that should
be a pretty good way of protecting your roses if you're finding that there's a problem with
with budworm damage all right that's all I've got to say about what's eating your roses
obviously I've skipped a whole bunch of past here things like thrips and spider mites that
more or less just because stippling or damage to the foliage. But you don't see the chew
marks that's what I'm I'm try to cover in this video if you have any questions about
the topic please leave those down below in the comments of the video and certainly if
you have any other favorite rose past that you like to bring to light to everybody sure
love to hear especially when it comes to large urban force I'm always interested to hear
what those are by location right thanks so much for watching.