The pest is rose slugs, and they can really turn a rose plant ugly.
Rose slugs are the larvae of sawflies (a primitive wasp), and they eat the upper parts of the leaves. They quickly turn this...
...into this mess:
Here you can see one turning healthy leaf into soon-to-be-dead leaf:
They don't touch the blooms though:
Rose slugs also don't eat the entire leaf, just the tops.
So what's eating these leaves (besides deer I mean)?
Oh. I don't think I've ever seen a caterpillar on the roses before. Maybe I just haven't looked closely enough. (It should be pointed out that rose slugs are not caterpillars, so this isn't a bigger, older rose slug.)
Even though the plant is under attack, it still looks fine from normal viewing distance:
I guess that's why I never really bother with treating the rose slugs. I think I'll get out the insecticidal soap as soon as I'm done posting this and see how that goes though. I do not like those crispy leaves!
I think I'll let this guy munch away though. A wren will surely spot it soon, right? Maybe I'll wait until it pupates and put it in a jar to see what it becomes...
Anybody else having any rose pest issues right now?
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In Virginia (where it's a little warmer) we had inchworms - they ate my dogwood leaves and rose buds, so very few blooms this spring. When I was working in the yard, their droppings sounded like rain, that's how many there were. Those rascals!
ReplyDeleteTHe insecticidal soap worked on the ones that got sprayed, drying them up. But there were more that didn't get hit.
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