I have never been sure of the classification of roses. For a while, I guessed "mineral."

The final phase of Operation NeverMow-- the name I've now given to my 2-year project (a 2-year project entering it's fifth or sixth year) to convert our yard into a perennial garden that never needs to be mowed (get the name now?) is the rose bushes that I've put up near the front by the mailbox: miniature roses on a couple of bushes that should eventually look really nice, or so I thought when I picked them up for $2.99 on clearance.

(Operation NeverMow is on a tight budget.)

Then I find out that rose bushes are particularly susceptible to all kinds of pests, and suddenly that $2.99 isn't looking so well spent, because I don't want to be always having to go out and spray pesticides and also we live on a hill and at the bottom of the hill, 200 yards away, is a lake, and any pesticides I spray that don't go straight to the groundwater are going to end up in the lake killing fish and boaters and waterskiiers, and I might be okay with getting rid of a few of those guys on jet skis, but is it really my place to determine that?

Oh, the moral questions involved with roses!

Moral questions I can avoid simply by getting some organic pest control, like the Safer Brand Bug Patrol, whose organic bug patrol kills over 40 insects.

The Safer® Brand Bug Patrol comes ready to spray, and it wipes out, on contact, almost any bug you can think of: beetles, whiteflies, aphids, even something called "chinch bugs," which, while I don't know what they are, they don't sound like the nice kind of bugs, like butterflies, and so I want them out of here.

But while it's lethal to bugs, it doesn't hurt the environment and can be used on lawns, trees, shrubs, and flowers. Which is good, because I'm pretty sure roses are either a shrub or a flower, so it'll work on them. I just need to hook it to the hose, spray, and it's sayonara, bugs, aloha roses.