Seeing how it is April Fools’ day here in the good ol’USA, add them to some wasabi and serve them up with chips and tell everyone they are guacamole!!
You know, to my taste buds, they’d probably be indistinguisable from avocado and the color would be about right! LOL!
On plants that size I pick them off with a toothpick or use a little spray bottle and knock them off with water.
ROFLOL…I love the combined April humor!!
:O)
This OP seed had been sent to me two years in a row to get started, as the first year I received this seed slugs killed the babies 
So this was the second year in a row receiving this OP seed cross!
At first I thought the numerous yellowing leaves were the result of fungal attacks, and it was so bad I was thinking of culling it and forgetting about it, but especially since this cross was supposed to pass on good health in some of its progeny, that in itself made me think twice about what I was observing and deducing.
That is what got me to examine leaves under magnification, and then I guessed that the main problem contributing to the huge leaf damage could well have been these very numerous aphids. It is all on a very small scale, and to be honest even though I had seen the aphids here and there with my own eyes, I never actually connected one problem with the other. Dugh!! I am so glad I did, otherwise this seedling might have been culled for the wrong reason!!
What this seedling has taught me is that I should be very careful in declaring something so tiny to be “diseased”, and then cull it, without first really considering other insect/environmental causes of leaf damage!!!
As for the aphid control, remember that the aphids had already done a pre-lethal amout of leaf damage to this seedling for many many weeks, ununterrupted, and since it was so important to get it to live on, I was not going to settle for anything less that 100% immediate kill.
I sprayed it with a ready made solution of imidacloprid purchased ready mixed from the local supermarket (0.125 g/L).
$11 spent, a few squirts and problem solved! Too easy :O)
Don’t forget, spraying with water and flicking them off does not deal with their eggs, the problem continues. If it were another seedling I actually would not have even bothered to flick them off, let alone spray with water (or anything else).
Maybe I should pay a little more attention to aphids from now on, at a much earlier stage of seedling development!!!
OK… here is the same seedling featured above, as it appears today. The aphids are all gone and about one week ago, I re-potted it into a 1/1 soil/potting mix media (was originally sprouted in a 1/1/1 peat/sand/perlite mix).
During the transplant I noted very little root growth.
:O(
It is actually still not happy, despite no aphids.
Its leaves are still browning (especially on the leaf tips/margins) then yellowing, and then dropping off. The plant then attempts to catch up with nice new green leaves which then proceed to get the same symptoms within days of formation.
It is frustrating, and something about what is going on here is strange to me. I have not really come across this pattern of decline before in new seedlings, at least as far as I can recall.
What could be causing this browning of its leaf margins and leaf abscission?? (it has nothing to do with the imidacloprid spray for aphid I have applied, as the same symptoms were there before ever spraying it).
I have been fertilizing with a standard N-P-K (15-4-26) at a very dilute dose (10% of full strength dose) every couple days.
The N analysis of this preparation is: 8.8% nitrate, 3.6% ammonium, 2.6% urea.
Such a very dilute version of this soluble fertilizer mix (1/10 of normal full strength dose) has never obviously caused me problems with tiny rose seedlings that I can remember.
I really don’t want to cull, if I can fix the problem here.
… ummm should I stop all fertilizing?
Any other ideas about what is going on, or what I should do here??
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I really hesitate to advise, but your soilless mix may be inhibitory, or the fertilizer may be too much. Looks like salt necrosis on leaves. But did you check for spider mites?
I prefer a peat-soil mix home-made, and always underfertilize. Species didn’t evolve in high nitrogen soils. We’ve only selected for tolerant plants the last couple hundred years (not generations but years). Some books warn not to fertilize rose species such as foetida. And for sure our prairie species are in very low N soils. Too much urea and ammonia in your fertilizer too. Only woodland plants find ammonium satisfactory. Others generally prefer nitrate. A sterile medium cannot convert the urea to nitrate because all the nitrifiers have been killed, or were never there. So urea and ammonium burn is common.
I would diagnose it as too much love.
The burning of the edges of the upper leaves may be symptomatic of fertilizer burn. I would discontinue fertilization for now.
However, probably more important would be to let the soil get fairly dry between waterings. It looks totally saturated, and that can make things go downhill.
OK thanks Larry and Joe, I really appreciate your help.
I am pretty sure it is not spider mites, I know the very bottom dead leaf looks suspicious of that, but it is dead in the picture (actually it was not even connected to the plant when I tugged it away).
I’m glad I transplanted it out into soil based media last week.
I’ll quit the fertilizer, and dry it up a bit.
I don’t know that I can get a ready mixed NPK here with that more preferable N breakdown (no/little urea or ammonium). Maybe I need to look at alternative fertilizers for the future (not the easiest thing to sort out, urea and ammonium seems to be incorporated heaps into these pre-mixed NPK formulae, these days).
crosses fingers
I suppose one other thing I never considered to think as a source of trouble here, is what the heck the local water contains in it (chemical treatments) which may adversely affect this particular cross…
Larry, in the past, you have mentioned the potentially bad effects to germinating rose seedlings using water that contains high enough concentrations of chlorides and chloramines (found as additives in certain town water drinking supplies).
I also of course use the local tap water to mix with the fertilizer powder when preparing the liquid solution.
I still have some of that de-mineralized water I used in my recent R.gigantea germination “experiments”.
Ummmm…should I use that water as the source of this seedling’s water supply (and even rain water when it rains), instead of tap water?
Actually, it’s gone back to rain mode here, its been raining heavy since last night on and off…I just put out a bucket to collect the stuff…I need to get off my butt and less lazy about collecting rainwater, since lately it has been soooo abundant…and costs me nothing :O)
Definitely! I’ve always said seedlings know the difference between rain and tap water. It isn’t the amount, but the quality of the water. Ours is full of chloramines, made even more alkaline to prevent further deterioration of our ancient, failing infrastructure. All the plants definitely look happier after being washed off and hydrated with water much less contaminated than that which comes from the hose.
OK…thanks Kim, easy enough done!
Enough collected?..why not try for a bit more!!!..after 2 days worth of DUMPING, it looks to be continuing today as well (Tasman sea / Pacific ocean influence strongly affects this city’s climate).
:O)
So much for hot and dry Australia LOL (to the north of me are subtropics, and to the extreme north of me are tropical zones).
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Progressing forwards!!
I know me revisiting some of my longish threads can be a bore for y’all, but I just thought some people might be interested to know what has since happened here with this sick kid.
Quickly recapping here, the recent cultural modifications that were made to this seedling were:
*The change from saturated wet damp peat/sand/perlite to soil/potting mix media.
*The cessation of fertilizing.
*The substitution of tap water to rainwater.
Now it is starting to look happier (I’m pretty sure it isn’t just me wishful thinking).
Thanks to y’all that helped me in this thread!
:O)
Sooo… I followed your steps and here it is a few weeks later…looks to me a high chance it was suffering fertilizer burn!!!
Now it is happy as!!
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Good news! I’m glad we could help.
Speaking of aphids, I just sprayed imidacloprid on some roses I had in pots in the greenhouse…I’ve been putting it off too long and it was quite an infestation. Not a good thing in a retail greenhouse, although this particular house is not open to the public.
Sure ya did !!!
A big THANK YOU to y’all that wrote here on this thread and tried to help my lil kid !!!
Congratulations!
No, you guys are smart, congrats to you for sharing your wisdom!!
:O)
George, how many plants does one have to kill before being considered “smart”? hehehe
LOL…
Ya can’t know everything all at once. I wish!
…all those that died were sacrifices in the name of learning, so that precious future ones (like this one) can be saved.