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Hampshire Garden Centre Tips On Caring For Your Roses

The first point to remember when it comes to caring for your roses is the need for a regular watering plan. You will then also need to work on pruning, as well as also providing constant protection from the weather and from disease.

Keep Watering Your Rose Plants

There are numerous types of flowers and plants that need very little watering. Just douse a few inches of water on them every day, and they will stay pretty happy and healthy all year round. Roses however, simply have to have a steady drizzle of water during the day to keep their roots well and truly soaked and to keep the soil in which they are located moist.

Water is an absolutely vital requirement to a newly planted rose. To encourage the development of your new rose bushes, you will have to keep the soil fairly moist for most of the time, but not completely saturated. When your rose becomes established, it won't need anywhere near as much water as when it was new, but it would still need its root system to be soaked completely most of the time. Steady watering over a period of several hours is required to do this. If you do not have the time to spend just standing there with your watering can watering your roses, then you ought to seriously consider developing a simple irrigation or sprinkling system that will make the task of watering your roses a much simpler proposition for you.

Pruning Your Roses

Taking decent care of your roses will also involve regular pruning. Pruning is absolutely essential to the rose because it promotes quality air circulation, which in turn protects it from disease and encourages its growth.

The best time to start pruning is during the rose's dormant season, this tends to be in the spring when the new leaf buds have just started to sprout from the stems. The dead or dying branches, and anything that appears to be weak growth must be cut off so as not to sap much needed nutrients from the healthy parts of the plant. Any branches that rub together must be cut off as well.

To stimulate a healthy growth, young and newly planted roses should only be allowed four stems or canes so that the nutrients would be more concentrated within the plant. Once they are established, they can have eight canes or more. When pruning the canes of a rose, you should cut them back around half or a quarter of their original height.

Pruning should also be done on a regular basis during the growing period of your rose. The weak growth needs to be removed at the base so the nutrients aren't stolen from the healthier canes.

Getting rid of the dead flower heads and the dried out leaves also encourages your plant to flower on a grand scale on a repeated basis.

Protecting Roses in Winter

The long hard winter months can be a particularly harsh time and is certainly no friend of roses. To ensure that the plant will remain alive and well during the winter season, it simply has to be adequately protected. A commonly employed method of protecting the rose plant in the winter is to just bury it in soil and mulch for most of the season, certainly if the temperature stays below freezing for a lengthy period.

To do this, just simply dig a small trench to the height of the rose plant itself, and then tip it down. You can put a rose collar around it for extra protection. Afterwards, you cover it up in a mound of soil up to 30 centimetres in height. Cover it further with a mound of high quality organic mulch to protect it from the freezing winter weather conditions. However, if it gets too snowy or frosty, use a rose cone to cover the tips of the plant instead of mulch. If you do use a rose cone, make sure that you take it off whenever the sky is cloudy. This will ensure that your plant will not get shocked and burned from the sudden exposure to direct sunlight. Remove completely once the freezing winter weather conditions have passed.

Keeping Your Roses Disease Free

Most roses available nowadays have been bred to become resistant from disease. Nonetheless, constant care is still necessary to keep the roses from becoming sick and defoliated. The following procedures will help.

To keep your roses disease free, you have to prune your roses regularly. Get rid of all dead buds and dead leaves from the plants. Also, get rid of the weak and dead stems as they can become breeding areas for spores and insects. A good tip is to cultivate the soil on a regular basis so that any breeding insects or spores there will be exposed to and subsequently killed by the sunlight. Also try to keep the weeds from growing around your roses.

A decent amount of water mixed with some baking soda and a tiny bit of corn oil sprayed on your roses can also help keep disease away. Done regularly, this spraying program will prevent diseases such as the black spot from infecting your roses. If you see signs of infection anywhere on your plant, quickly cut it away to stop it from spreading to the other sections of the plant.

Article Source: GardenGap.com

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