Many gardeners and landscapers enjoy growing and caring for roses. Through careful selection of varieties and appropriate cultivation, roses can be grown with a minimum of pest problems. Establishing rose plants to grow in environments with adequate conditions will allow them to grow well, while reducing their susceptibility to pests.
Find more information on growing healthy roses in UC IPM's newly updated Pest Notes: Roses in the Garden and Landscape: Cultural Practices and Weed Control, authored by John Karlik, Environmental Horticulture Advisor with UC Cooperative Extension, Kern County.
What's new in this version? You'll find examples...
Palm trees are commonly seen in California, making some think about the tree-lined streets of Hollywood, or sitting by the pool somewhere. These tropical or subtropical trees are beautiful and varied, with many different types of palms, each adapted for different growing conditions and each with specific disease-causing pathogens that can attack it.
Palm trees, like other plants, are susceptible to pathogens that can weaken or even kill the tree. Diseases such as diamond scale, pink rot, Fusarium wilt, and others can reduce the leaf canopy, discolor leaves and trunk, and cause distortion, stunting or death.
If you have palm trees or care for palms as part of your work, it's important to identify and know about these...
- Author: Karey Windbiel-Rojas
- Author: Elaine Lander
Whether you're having a backyard barbecue or enjoying outdoor activities as the weather warms up, it's important to protect yourself from mosquitoes and their bites. Not only can these buzzing insects be a nuisance, certain mosquito species can transmit West Nile virus and other public health threats in California.
Late spring rains followed by warm, sunny days can create the perfect mosquito breeding habitat. Mosquitoes need very little standing water to lay eggs that can hatch in as little as one day. So remember, drain after the rain to fight biting mosquitoes!
What should you do to protect yourself? If...
Soil solarization is a method home gardeners and farmers can use to manage soilborne pests such as weeds, disease pathogens, nematodes and insects. Solarization can reduce help reduce pesticides used to control these pests.
Soil solarization is simple: prepare the site, water it a bit, then cover the soil with clear plastic for an extended period of time to allow the sun to heat the soil to temperatures lethal to a wide range of pests.
Learn more about this process in our recently updated Pest Notes: Soil Solarization for Gardens & Landscapes, by authors Jim...
- Author: Karey Windbiel-Rojas
It's not often that we get to mix baseball and pests in our blog, but today we learned that the San Francisco Giants and Cincinnati Reds game was delayed by almost 20 minutes due to swarming bees.
You can read different takes on this story from the Washington Post, NBC News, and on the Major League Baseball website, and see as one Reds player pretended to spray a pesticide to kill the bees.
In a practical...