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| Dear Garden Folk
Whether it's the local nursery or at Home Depot or Lowes, the roses always look really prolific and vibrant. Well...I get them home, plant them, give them love and a attention and, oops...they don't look so good anymore. The flowers are few and far between Am i doing something wrong? Thanks! Dale |
Follow-Up Postings:
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- Posted by floridarosez9 10 (My Page) on Fri, Aug 10, 12 at 18:35
| First, consider your soil. Find out whether it's acidic or alkaline and adjust accordingly. I garden in sugar sand with NO nutrients, so I have to amend heavily. You also need to consider whether you're watering and fertilizing adequately. And last, whether the roses you bought are good in your climate. Just because they are sold at HD or Lowe's doesn't mean it's a good rose for your location. |
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| Nursery plants are grown in shade or glass houses, given fertilizer with every watering, given filtered water, provided precise temperatures for optimal fast growth. Then suddenly they are sitting on hot asphalt at a big box store, get snapped up by a customer, and taken home to less-than-protected, less-than-perfect conditions. And they are shocked, the foliage starts looking bad, and the rose stops blooming. It may be nothing you did, and may not be your soils fault at all. Give them a recovery time. They must adjust to different water, extremes of temperature, new soil, insects, disease pressure. They must grow a root system in the soil, which takes a plant considerable effort. The more perfect conditions they were produced in, the more of a shock normal garden conditions are going to be. Plants used to be grown in the open and experienced conditions similar to the conditions they would get when taken home and planted. But then the plants would not look "perfect" and flawless. They might be a little chewed, and have a yellow leaf or two. Nowadays, plant production is so fine-tuned and so much is known about how to "pump up" plants to look absolutely gorgeous for a few days so people will buy them. But they don't get those ideal conditions even from very experienced gardeners when they are planted out in the real world. So what happens is what you are seeing. The roses can bounce back and look good again with good care and patience. |
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| Once planted in the garden, they plants need to get more roots under them in order to bloom. Also, although Knock Out is said to be "self cleaning", the series does much better when deadheaded, hedge clippers will do. Patience. |
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| The roses I�m referring to are 3 years old (at least). I water and fertilize and get very little results. I think I�ll try fertilizing more regularly. The culprit, I think, is the amount of sun they get. They (the growers of KO's) say that they will flowers with some shade. Probably not gonna happen. Oh well...I think I�ll give them more attention and try to improve their growing environment Thanks for the thoughts! |
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| The culprit, I think, is the amount of sun they get... You just answered your own question. This has to do with zone as well--"some shade" in Arizona is probably necessary. "Some shade" in MA is a different story. |
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| You are probably wise to not believe the flowering in shade pitch. There are many roses that will grow in partial shade and even occasionally flower, but in all the cases I'm aware of, shade cuts down on the flowering quite a bit, and roses that are normally disease-resistant in the sun often start having some disease problems when grown in partial shade. Roses in general need at least 6 hours of sun, reasonably decent soil, generous watering in the hot,hot, hot summer (and 2-3 inches of mulch), and a feeding about every 6 weeks in the spring and early fall (forget the feeding when the temps are really high in midsummer). I think Knock Out roses would appreciate the same treatment. Kate |
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