 Hi, I'm Marcy Degman, the aspiring gardener, and today we're going to talk about getting rid of aphids on a rose plant. Now, as you can see, this is a really early rose. It's very, very succulent. There's a lot of new growth, and that's what aphids love. It's not your fault if you have aphids. It isn't always a sign of disease. It can be a very healthy rose bush and still have aphids. One thing that will encourage them a little bit is if you over fertilize and have too much succulent growth, you will encourage more aphids. But generally, they just kind of come along. So, what you want to do is keep your eye out for them. They'll usually cluster around the top, around the new growth, and you'll see a little, just a little colony of green soft bugs. They can also be red and they can be brown. But they're very soft and they're squishy. So, if you've never seen one, you'll know what when you do. And there's two ways, first off, that you can get rid of aphids. And that would be if there's just a few, you can actually just scrape them off. If that doesn't bother you too much, a lot of people do a lot of mechanical clean up in their garden. The other thing you can do, especially in a larger rose that's sturdier than this, is you can just take the hose and blast the aphids off. Just get as many of them off of the bushes you can. They don't necessarily hatch out eggs and do a lot of damage until later. If you leave the aphids, they will go down into the ground and they will lay eggs and they will stay over winter. So, you just want to keep up on them. But if you have them, don't be too discouraged. They'll mostly cause a little bit of, they'll kind of curl your leaves a little bit and they'll cause some damage to the rose buds. But once you get rid of a middle recover, you can also cut that off if there's a whole lot of them. Just cut that portion completely off. Now, if you don't want to pick off the aphids and you don't really want to blast your roses with water, there are some other things you can do. One of the most popular ways is to use common dish soap. And what you're going to do is you're just going to take about a teaspoon or two of common dish soap, add it to a sprayer of water, mix it up and just spray it. The disadvantage is that it will wash away when it rains. So, if you want to use this method, it won't hurt your roses. I use an environmentally friendly soap, so I don't have to worry about any harm to anything. What it'll do is it'll just repel them. They won't like it. So, what you do is you just add that. You can keep it on hand, mix it up all summer long. I use come along and spray all of the foliage, especially at the top where the aphids seem to congregate. And you have to be kind of proactive about this because it isn't a harsh insecticide, but it definitely has a good effect on aphids. The other thing you can use is a fairly safe environmental soap and insecticidal soap that you know, read it, make sure that it's not going to take, you know, damage your beneficial insects or do any harm to your plant. And you'll do that the same way. The third thing you can do is you can buy ladybugs and you can set them loose because they love aphids. So, if you're into beneficial insects, try ladybugs. And those are ways that you can get rid of aphids on your rosebush.