I am still new to this forum and am still working on figuring it out, so I am just going to copy the private message I sent to Sue and add a couple of comments from her response. I hope you don't mind.
Sent to Sue:
Hi Sue....
I still haven't figured out when I should be responding to a thread on this site, so after reading your blog, I thought I would send you a private message. I hope this works.
Rose curculios can be easily managed to the point where you will get most of a first flush of roses undamaged. By most, the only roses you won't see in that flush are the ones which have not bloomed yet. And, no, you will not find this method documented anywhere on any site on the net. It's something I came up with several years ago.
I only have about 100 roses in this garden, and it does take time and work to rid the garden of the dang bugs, but it works. It happened by accident. I was hand picking bugs on Linda Campbell and realized while I was working on one plant, the dang bugs were busy on the other 99 roses. (They also work from first light to last light seven days a week ... I don't.) Since they only come up from the ground to eat and lay eggs in the buds for about 10 weeks, I decided that if there were no buds, they would leave. My garden was horribly infested from prior years, so plenty of the bugs were coming up out of the ground. After disbudding the garden, I saw two curculios the next night, then one, and then NONE. They all migrated OUT of the garden.
I've followed this practice for years and now the curculios have to find my garden because they don't breed in my garden. When I see the first curculio or the first damaged bud, I disbud the whole garden for the rest of their life cycle. For me, that is generally around the end of June.
You will find your roses push more buds and foliage during the disbudding period than usual because they have a mandate to bloom. Your roses will be stronger and healthier in the long run.
Smiles,
Lyn
PS ... feel free to share this information
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Additional Comments ...
Sue and others ... once the garden is disbudded any curculio coming up to feed and lay eggs will migrate out of the garden. Within a couple of days, you won't see any more bugs, but you have to disbud every day because the roses will be pushing buds.
Next year, you will have fewer damaged roses in the first flush, but you will have some because the bugs have already been breeding in your garden this year. The following year, you'll have a fuller first flush before they find the garden.
The best news is that by disbudding the roses this year, you are going to have a much larger and denser flush once you stop disbudding and allow the roses to bloom. That was MY biggest surprise.
Other gardeners in my garden club reported curculio damage in their gardens about 4 weeks ago. I saw my first curculio this week and have disbudded all of my roses. It takes the bugs a while to find your garden when they are not breeding in your garden.
Curculios will go after any colored rose of any class. Here's a link to the information in the GLOSSARY on HMF
http://www.helpmefind.com/gard...
Lyn
I am adding a photo of Gourmet Popcorn's first flush this year with no damaged blooms.
