22,153 Garden Web Discussions | Roses
I doubt if you have killed them.
The roses in front of my home were deer pruned for years before I bought my home. The previous owner was in her 90s and had stopped protecting them every night as she had done for years.
It was a while before I could install deer fencing up to protect the plants. The deer pruned them any time they wanted. Now, that they are protected, all have come surging back and are over 6' tall.
Smiles,
Lyn
I bought them direct from David Austin. I planted them this year in the Spring. I've bought from David Austin before with no problems so I don't think they were diseased from day 1. I could be wrong. The Harlow Carr roses were going to a long hedgerow of roses. I hesitate to tell you how many I dug up.
I don't have a picture. I took cuttings of the canes to a couple of local nurseries and both places said rosette disease. The canes were very red with an abnormal amount of thorns compared to the green canes. The redness was the entire cane even where it emerged from the root stock. The canes were very limp too. Based on the pictures that I saw on the internet I think it was rosette disease. Maybe I jumped the gun but I have lots of other roses so I wanted to be preemptive.
Ann is right. I live in a heavily wooded area of CT. I removed wild roses when I first moved here but there might be other roses nearby. I'm sort of in shock and wonder if I should give up on roses altogether.
Thanks for all of the comments.
CT,
Also look UP in trees. Multiflora can reach several tens of feet up into any available tree.
One thing I didn't type above was to ask if these particular roses happened to be planted in a place, were it a snow fence, where snow would have accumulated.
The vector mites do drop out of the air when the air currents drop significantly.
I've got one place where I expect to loose a rose each year because of the air currents that tend to slow there.
Hope this helps.
If the clay is too hot and baked and therefore hard to dig in, run the sprinkler for several hours and let the water soak in overnight--or for 24 hrs (or more) if it is still to wet. When it gets down to moist but not wet, try digging. Should be much easier.
But don't tromp around in it while it is wet, or you will definitely have compacted soil (if you didn't before).
Kate
Michael is so right about preparing the whole bed.
On the house pad where my primary rose garden in located, I have what amounts to glacier slurry/subsoil. The house pad was cut out of a slope created by glacier runoff eons ago.
Once the decorative rock the previous owners used for the back of the house was scraped off, I was left with soil that was mostly rock with clay and silt between the tightly compacted rock.
My huge novice mistake was to dig rose holes instead of preparing the whole bed. I created a gardening nightmare.
I cannot buy soil or mulch up here, but I could buy bags of compost.
I mixed a lot of compost with the native soil and screened out a lot of the rock from the native soil that I mixed with the compost when I planted my first roses. As the compost decomposed, the roses sank! How much they sank depended on how much organic material I mixed in with the native soil.
I have since found that all of those rocks do not decompose and allow for good drainage in clay soil. I don't screen them out any more. In fact, I add rocks to my back fill instead of organic material and mound the soil in the planting hole UP so that when the rose sinks due to the OM around the root mass decomposing, it settles at the level that I want for the rose.
Over the years, I've applied all of my organic materials on top of the soil. I have perfect drainage due to the rocks and the clay between the rocks held moisture quite well. I found that it is much easier to correct the nutrients values than to try to correct drainage.
Putting the OM on top has actually improved my soil. Until the extreme drought, I had plenty of earth worms and the soil gradually became more friable. It is not fertile, yet.
None of my roses died and except those that are not suited to my climate, all of them have done quite well.
I do think that had I prepared whole beds properly with as much OM as possible and allowed it to set until the OM decomposed, I would have had an easier time of it in the long run.
Kate ... I have so much rock in my soil, I can walk on it when it is fully saturated. Common sense would tell one that this is not the soil environment to grow healthy roses. The good news is that the roses don't know that. They just want to grow.
Smiles,
Lyn
I wouldn't take off any of the leaves it still has. Let them feed the plant while they still can. They will fall off on their own eventually. They also provide some shade for the canes if the sun is still hot. Just keep it watered as needed and let it be until next spring.
After learning where you live, I understand that heat was not a factor, but roses just don't transplant easily unless from small or medium pots. When you dig them, the fine roots are lost or disconnected from the soil, and the coarse roots are not able to supply enough water. So they will wilt and maybe defoliate, even in mild BC weather, because lots of water is being lost through the leaves. The particular problem with transplanting this time of year is that any new leaves that grow out will not have time to replace the energy spent in growing them out. If you waited till late October, your alba (or other deciduous rose) would have withdrawn and stored nutrients from the leaves and there would be no loss of water from the foliage. Dormant roses can be transplanted without much pruning.
As to excess watering, soil being saturated for two weeks will kill the feeder roots and cause yellowing and defoliation. Soak the transplant in with a very heavy watering, let drain, and then water normally.
So overwatering may have caused defoliation, but it can happen without that.
So true, it's always good to learn something new. If I hadn't been on the forum I wouldn't have learned about different ways to ferilize, so I'm thankful for all the good advice and ready to put it to use. When I was a little girl my mom would make sun tea, she would put the tea bags in a big glass pitcher filled with water and sit it in the window in the sun all day and that night she would add sugar and it would be the best sweet tea ever! I think I am going to try the same approach with alfalfa tea bags and hopefully have good results with my roses, minus the sugar of course :) and I won't drink it lol, just the roses.
I also do not water afterwards after applying LIquid fertilizers...
But like Seil I make sure the soil is moist before applying.
Here in our cooler climate with clay soil I actually water the day before applying liquid fertilizer...
Blackspot is not airborne to any significant extent. It carries over mainly within the bark of canes and to a lesser extent in fallen leaves (Compendium of Rose Diseases). Landscape cloth would have no effect on disease, but I think every experienced gardener here would say it is useless and troublesome in the long run. Mulch rots on top and the resulting soil supports weed growth.
'Carefree Beauty' is BS-resistant in many gardens, but apparently you have a race of BS that affects it. Frankly, your choices are to live with it, try a different variety of rose, or spray fungicide every two or three weeks.
A little more information might help. What do you use to spray for BS? How often? Do you use Bayer Garden Disease Control for Roses, Flowers, and Shrubs (and I mean that exact name--not one of the other Bayer products)?
Are you sure you are not looking at old blackspots which were killed by a previous spray? The spots will not disappear even though you have destroyed the fungus called blackspot. However, the new leaves should come in with no spots on them.
Do you have this problem all growing season? Or just at certain times--maybe spring and fall?
Kate
No, it didn't survive last winter, Sara. I wasn't really sorry to see it go though. The blooms were lovely but the plant had powdery mildew from the minute I brought it home until it went dormant in the fall. I was really disappointed with it.
Good luck seil!
I should be there. Plan on bringing a friend of mine that is just starting to get in to roses. I think he'll enjoy it. If I have enough mini's, I might do an arrangement.