Josh

And here was how I formed the "box" before filling it with the mulch. I spread the roses out much more, so they are in three rows going the length of the "box". There are 20 in there now:

I imagine if you are able to put together something similar, you'd be able to take advantage of all the Autumn leaves as filler, in lieu of mulch. If you can shred the leaves with a lawn mower, all the better -- there will be less air-space if the particles are smaller.

:-)

~Christopher

I'm figuring that roses are finished for us for the year! This afternoon I finished up putting a couple inches of horse manure compost then a couple inches of fine pine bark mulch on top of that on all my roses. I thinking I'm pretty much done 'til February or so.

Whether they go dormant or not is a decision that (in our part of the world) generally gets made BY THE ROSES in late December. We really don't have any say in the matter.

Even in years when we don't have freezes until mid December, the bloom production slows with decreasing sunlight and decreasing sun intensity.

Some years, Jean over in Nashville would see her OGRs start to bud out in late December. Northeast of Knoxville my roses were about two weeks later than hers.

Then would come the first two weeks of January warm spells. Then the early February cold.

Some years I would use "dormant strength" Lime Sulphur to deleaf my roses in late December/early January and to try to keep them from too early bud break in that January warm spell. Many years that worked. Then a few years there were spectacular failures (I will just mention the "late Easter FREEZE" that destroyed first bloom all over the southeastern quadrant of this country.

After that one, I decided the roses were mature enough to be left on their own.

IF, and I do mean IF there is a forecast for three days below minus ten Fahrenheit as it did happen in the 1980s, we'll all go, dig up our roses and live with our bare root bushes for a week or so. That was in very late January, and killed so many, many plants. It also set gardening in this part of the world back seriously.

Fortunately we weren't here in the 80s, that was the freeze that had us living in New Orleans and repairing broken pipes, having neighbor in the Quarter's water turned off because we could hear it running wild and out of control in his town house where it had frozen. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about plumbing that cold spell.

But we did get to -10 F about 15 years ago; fortunately we had 18" of snow at the time.

So the averages that put me in Zone 7 need to be looked at with the knowledge that averages don't kill plants, extremes kill plants.