Roses: the straight scoop part 6 winter care for your roses - gardening

Flower & Garden Magazine, Nov, 2001 by Ann Hooper

In the spring, remove the soil mound, straighten up the rosebush, and replant the half of the root system you dug up in the fall.

The Minnesota Tip is a lot of work, but your roses are guaranteed to come through the most miserable winter unscathed. In fact, these plants are often the first to bloom in the spring.

Potted roses, or roses growing in containers of any kind, will most assuredly not survive winter without protection. I water mine well and drag them into a dark corner of the garage where they sleep undisturbed until spring. But there are several other ways to do it if you don't have a suitable unheated space. You can bury the pots and mound the plants with soil, just as if they were planted in the ground. Or you can place the pots right up next to the foundation of the house and mound the pots with lots of soil. I've often wondered if you couldn't just wrap the pots with fiberglass insulation and add soil to fill up the space between the top of the pot and the top of the insulation. I've never tried this, and I don't have any idea if it will work. But it seems logical.

One thing you should never consider unless you have a greenhouse, is bringing big potted roses inside for the winter. The soil will dry out and they will die. They will get spider mites and they will die. Or they won't get enough light and they will die. Forget it. It just doesn't work.

The exception is miniature roses. They can survive and even bloom on a sunny windowsill if you keep them moist but not wet, never let the soil dry out, and provide lots of humidity so they don't get spider mites. Mini roses do very well indoors under lights.

The easiest alternative, of course, is to do nothing, let your potted roses die, and buy new ones to grow and enjoy next season. There's certainly nothing wrong with growing roses as annuals if you don't have the time, place, strength, or energy to mess with winter protection.

At winter's end, usually mid to late April, depending on your climate, winter protection materials should be removed. Soil should always be washed away with a gentle spray from the hose so as not to disturb any growth that may have started under the mounds.

* FOR ROSES GROWN IN TEMPERATE CLIMATES

In warm climates, roses will grow nearly all year round if left to their own devices. Especially in the southernmost U.S., South Florida, South Texas, and Hawaii, where the soil stays warm all year, roses won't stop growing unless the conscientious rosarian steps in. But in most other southern climates the soil does cool sufficiently to help the rosarian induce a dormant period. This cool period occurs at different times in different areas, so you must determine when that is where you live. In most parts of the temperate United States, it's December and January.

Whether roses in warm climates grow lustily all year long, or slow down at the coolest time of the year, the plants need a dormancy period, induced by the rosarian, to recover their energy. Roses grow hard and fast during the season, and like people, they will be re-energized if given a few weeks of rest and relaxation before the first flush of spring bloom.