I have best luck transplanting well before hot weather--like now, if you have time.

Give the plants a good deep watering, get your holes dug & water them, then transplant the next day or so. Heavily mulch & keep watered well after transplanting. Be very conservative with fertilizing--let them get established for a season or so. I usually dig a big hole & amend the local "soil" (caliche, really) at least 1/2 with pine fines or a good commercial potting mix The pine fines really keep it fluffy.

Dunno how extreme your seasons are up there, but fall is the most popular time for planting shrubs & perennials down here since heat, not cold, is the biggest trial to plants.

Spring planting runs from late Feb-April, often by May it's consistently just too dang hot. I routinely get bare root roses during that time & have good luck planting them, even though I prefer fall planting. Hope this is useful.

If the roses are planted in plain old plastic nursery pots, you can cut the pots away with a linoleum knife and avoid harming the root ball by tugging and pulling to get the rose out of the pot.

Thank you ladies. The large container roses are purposely planted that way and have all thrived. They were planted last season. I want them to remain healthy and am not really sure how long it is okay to grow them that way. I will show a picture of one. I think the containers are ample size, but I am not really sure. This is the floribunda Drop Dead Red.

You just need to not disturb the root ball. Otherwise plant just the way you did in the pots only in a much bigger hole with amended soil. Also, I would raise the bed, have a shallow bowl in the center, plant the graft (if there is one) one inch below the surface, mulch heavily and put in surface drip watering.

As Henry said, if you don't disturb the root balls they won't suffer much if any shock at all. For the most part I've found that the root balls will easily slide right out of the pots whole and go right into the hole. Just make sure your holes are bigger than the pots are and they should be fine.

Those are nice sized pots. I think you could keep them potted up another year if that's what you'd really like to do.

if the soil falls away from the root ball, just forge ahead and water well until u see new growth. I would do this as soon as the soil is workable. These pots do not look like the thin disposable nursery pots. with those flimsy pots, one can actually wrap a rubber band around it, cut off the bottom, slip it into the hole and remove the sleeve.

Good advice above--but in Zone 6 Kansas, the last freeze date is some time around mid-April. The usual practice is not to plant container roses until after the last freeze date. In fact, one reputable nursery won't even send me its container plants until early May--they are fanatical about making sure the container plant is not planted in the garden until all danger of freeze is past. But of course their plants have probably been growing in a nursery and yours, I take it, have been growing outdoors all winter? In which case, they may be hardy enough and hardened off enough not to mind weathering the transplanted spot even if a cold spell suddenly appeared in early April.

Kate

Thank you everyone for the good advice. I appreciate the helpful information.

You know, Sara, if you really would like to keep them in the pots instead of the ground there is a thing called root pruning that would let you do that. Since I keep a lot of roses in pots permanently I've had to learn how to do that.

There are variables, of course, the vigor of the plant, the pot size and such, but in a cold zone you usually would only have to do this about every 3 to 5 years. I can tell when one of my pots needs to be root pruned when I water it. If the water goes in the top and almost immediately starts running out the bottom that usually tells me the rose is root bound in the the pot and there isn't much soil left in there.

Early spring is the best time to do it because you will be pruning back the plant anyway so pruning off some of the roots shouldn't hurt it. You don't want to have fewer roots with a huge plant on top that it can't feed. Besides it's going into full growth mode and will start growing those root back quickly. Let the pot get a little dry. This helps to keep the root ball easier to handle. Slip out the root ball and carefully trim off some of the bottom and sides of the root ball. I trim mine by about half. Then repot the plant with fresh potting soil. Water it well and it should start to grow again in no time.

Hope that helps!

Seil - Thank you so much! I really appreciate you letting me know about the root pruning.