Everyone wants beautiful roses in their garden, but not everyone really knows how to care for them to get them to bloom beautifully all season. Most people understand the basics, feed, prune, and feed some more.
Roses do like to eat, and one of the best things to give them is a good dose of bone meal or blood meal. They also really like alfalfa, it helps the blooms. What I do is buy the dry alfalfa cubes, the kinds you see at pet stores for pet rabbits. I give each rose 2 cubes. Throw them into a bucket of water and leave it for about an hour. The cubes should be mushy and falling apart....stir them up, making sure they're all broken up. Pour directly on the ground around your rose bushes.
direct feeding with fertilizers is also good, especially the slow release types, but it never hurts to give them a dose of your water soluble stuff too.
Pruning is very important to your roses. Besides seasonal pruning (to be done differently for each type of rose) you should also keep your rose bushes dead headed throughout the growing and blooming seasons. After each flower is spent, cut the stem down to the next set of leaves, be sure to make a clean diagonal cut. This will help the stem put energy into creating a new blooming stem, rather than make seed.
The other thing to prune throughout the season are the suckers. All roses get suckers.
These are tall, thick rose branches that grow straight up from the base of the rose bush. Properly named, suckers suck bloom making energy from the bush. These easy to find branches never bloom, they just grow.... cut them off as low to the ground as possible, and continually check your roses throughout the season for more of them. The sucker in the photo was cut from my Double Delight Tea Rose. All roses need at least 6 hours of sunlight each day, so be sure to plant them in a sunny location. They need adequate water, but there are a few hybrids now a days that are able to withstand droughts rather well. Always research which roses will do the best in your area before deciding on which ones to go with. Well drained soil is also important, as root balls do not like soggy conditions.
Early to mid summer always brings on the pests, and one of the biggest pests to roses is the Japanese Beetle. They are the enemy of rose lovers everywhere. These beetles arrive in droves, landing on our beloved rose bushes, devouring the leaves, blooms and even the unopened buds of every flower they can find, causing huge amounts of damage in their path. Fighting them is not easy.
The fight begins with grub control. The japanese beetles start life under the dirt as grubs. Laying out grub control on your lawn begins the beetle control. Once the adults emerge, they are ready for destruction and mating. Keep a can of soapy water or water with ab it of vinegar in it nearby. Japanese beetles are slow and easy to ctach, knock them into your can, they can't escape and will die in minutes. You can also spray your roses with pesticides, but be careful, and spray only the plants that absolutely need it....remembering that pesticides will also kill beneficial insects as well as butterflies and other enjoyable types.... poison should always be a last resort, and still, only when desperation calls for it. After a few weeks, the beetle population dies back and the fight will be over, until next year....and never place a japanese beetle trap anywhere near your garden! .... it will only lure them to come find your flowers ... traps should only be used for very large yards, and only placed far away from your garden.
Following each of these basic guidelines should keep your roses blooming from summer until frost, of course some rose types may have other requirements as well... but this sums up the basic necessities and should get you on the way to enjoying some beautiful roses in your yard.
Carpet Rose "Amber"
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