Welcome to mid-summer! Wow, has it been hot here in Connecticut. The warmest spring I can ever remember morphed into the hottest summer ever. We have been over 90 degrees almost every day this month. Bob and I live in an old house in Windsor with no air conditioning. We have high ceilings, though, and I leave the attic door open so the convection carries the heat up and out. The only trouble is that the air coming in the windows is hot, too! Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining. I’d rather have it hot and dry than cold and rainy like it was all last summer.

When we get hot, what do we do? And what can we do for our lovely roses when they are suffering in the heat? The first line of heat defense for me and my roses is a cool shower. Normally I tell folks to keep their foliage as dry as possible, but when it’s this blistering hot, your roses will be thankful for a cool shower just like you! Shower off your foliage with your watering wand (I’ve been known to shower myself with it, too!), but try to do it early enough in the day so that the foliage will be dry by nightfall.

I’ve saved the coolest (joke) days this summer for my spray program, so I have no disease in my garden. This has been perfect weather for powdery mildew–hot and humid. If you do spray your roses, be sure to water well the day before so the foliage is turgid. That way when you spray the next morning while the air is cooler and still, the leaves won’t over-absorb spray product and be subject to chemical burn.

Do you have Japanese Beetles in your area of the country? Usually, we broadcast Bayer Complete Insect Killer in the spring (merit and beta-cyfluthrin), but my hubby never got around to it this year. Beetles just love this hot weather. Japanese beetles are scarab beetles, and over the years have been responsible for a lot of intermixing with others and now we have a whole selection of hybrid scarabs that all do the same damage. I do spray for insects this time of year, but things are growing so fast that I also hand pick them and drop them in a jar of soapy water. The soap breaks the surface tension of the water, and they sink and drown. Hah!

There are also quite a few cucumber beetles in my killing jar. They seem to really like to vary their diet with my yummy roses. Katydids are also frequent visitors to the rose garden. They are a beautiful spring-green grasshopper-like insect, but more graceful, and they are huge this year. Normally they don’t get to be this big (3-4″) until September, but we’ve had a very long growing season this year and apparently they have been indulging all season. They can do a lot of damage to ornamentals at night. You can hear them in the trees singing “kady-did, kady-did” all night long. Chances are that if you see big chewed holes in the leaves in the morning, a Katy did it! If you look over the plant, these can be hand-picked, too, as they are sluggish in the morning. Probably from pigging out all night…

Before we know it, the shadows will be getting longer, and the days will be getting shorter. Eventually, this heat will dissipate and cooler weather will arrive. Treat yourself to plenty of hydration in this heat, and treat your roses to plenty of hydration, as well. When it gets really hot, and especially if there is wind involved, your roses will be transpiring a lot. That’s a lot like humans perspiring. That moisture needs to be replaced to avoid severe heat related damage, so try to water your roses generously. It’s almost impossible to overwater roses that are actively growing in the garden. Spoil them a little now, and they will reward you with much bigger, brighter, fragrant blooms when the cooler weather arrives. The most important thing for all of us…don’t forget the H2O!

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