Poison ivy easy to miss while weeding

Some gardening tasks require careful attention to technique, including removing poison ivy, deadheading roses and treating your lawn for grubs.

I have been seeing poison ivy while weeding garden beds. It is easy to miss while weeding beds of ground covers and perennials.

To avoid getting accidentally exposed, look for the three separate leaflets that identify poison ivy. You can pull out poison ivy very carefully while wearing rubber gloves. Make sure no parts of the plant touch your clothes or bare skin. Leather gardening gloves will not protect you from the oil in poison ivy, which causes an allergic reaction. This oil will be on the rubber gloves used to pull it out, so avoid contact with the outer part of the gloves as you remove them. You can use special soap to wash areas of exposed skin to reduce the effects of poison ivy. This needs to be done soon after exposure.

Deadhead hybrid roses as soon as the flowers fade. Landscape roses in most home gardens are self-cleaning and don’t require deadheading, so maintain them as you do other flowering shrubs. When in doubt, lightly prune old blossoms to keep the plant looking attractive. Do not deadhead roses that you are growing for their hip production (the fruit that matures in later summer to fall).

Grubs can be a problem in lawns. In early summer, adult beetles looking for a place to lay their eggs are attracted to irrigated lawns that are surrounded by dry lawns.

If the season is dry and you are the only one on your block watering the lawn, you will have a greater chance of having grubs. Your lawn may or may not have a problem with grubs this year, so there is no need to treat your lawn proactively for them. Typically, when there are 8 to 12 grubs per square foot, visible damage will occur as they feed on the roots of the grass. The lawn will turn brown later in the season when hot and dry weather increases stress. Raccoons and skunks dig in lawns for the grubs — this is often the first sign the grubs are there. This typically starts to happen in August.

There are products designed for quick kill of grubs that are applied later in the season when grubs are causing visible damage. Be sure to read the label carefully to make sure you are using the right product at the right time of year. Products designed to prevent grubs are generally applied in late June to mid-July. Most gardeners do not need to apply grub control.

There is no need to control the small number of grubs that the lawn can withstand. I do not water my own lawn nor apply any grub controls and have never had a problem with grubs causing any noticeable damage to my turf, only minor damage that most would not notice.

• Tim Johnson is director of horticulture at Chicago Botanic Garden, chicagobotanic.org.