Early Spring in the Rose Garden

March is the month when the garden starts to wake up.

 

It is a good idea to clean up the garden. You can prune the roses once the forsythia starts to bloom in your area. Remove all the dead and decayed canes, small spindly canes and crossing branches. Try to keep the center of the plant open to allow air to circulate thereby reducing the chances of fungus and disease. Shape the bush to how you want it to look in the summer.

 

The bushes can be pruned hard or little. Hard pruning (6–12 inches) will produce lesser, but larger flowers on fat, long canes. This is how many exhibitors prune. Little pruning or just shaping the bush will produce smaller, but more blooms. It is your preference as to what you want from your garden. Cut the canes back to healthy white pith. The pith on some varieties may be inherently brownish. You need to know your bushes. Use clean and sharp bypass pruners, loppers, and pruning saws so you don’t damage the canes you are pruning.

 

A soil test is in order. This will give you an informed idea on the pH of your soil. Roses thrive in soil with a pH of between 6 and 6.5. You can add lime to increase the pH. To reduce the pH you can add sulfur granules or ammonium sulfate. As our area is usually acidic we need to do the liming. The fast acting lime is cost effective as it works three times faster even though you pay three times the cost for it. These things take time to take effect, so you will have to be at it and you need to evaluate the results on a regular basis. Now is a good time to start your fungicide and if needed an insecticide regimen. Start once a week and slowly move to a once in 10–15 day cycle.

 

Water the roses thoroughly and apply fertilizer around the base of the roses making sure to mix it in with the soil. You can use Rosetone as an all purpose organic fertilizer and Epsom salts to get basal breaks. 

 

Mulch the area. A thick layer of mulch will retain moisture uniformly in the soil once the weather warms up. It keeps temperatures 10 F to 15 F degrees cooler. It helps in weed control and minimizes splattering of rain-borne black spot spores. It breaks down providing essential nutrients and trace elements. In winter still air trapped in mulch is the best insulator.

 

Late March or early April is a good time to transplant roses in your garden. Evaluate your roses and see which ones aren’t performing well. Even though fall is the best time to order your roses, you might still get some last minute orders in for new roses. It is better to order early for best selection. Soon boxed roses will be available at retailers. Try to buy them early so they don’t sit on the store shelves for months and dry out. You need to be careful and buy only the good brands as they can be misnamed making it difficult for you if you would like to exhibit them.

 

You should already be having a detailed map of your garden. You should have a general layout of what varieties are planted and where they are planted. Update your map regularly when you move or remove roses. Now is a good time to make sure all roses have tags as they fade or get lost over the winter.

 

If you intend to make new beds this year, early spring is a good time to start on them. The cool weather makes digging and working in the soil easier. Roses love organic matter, and it is much easier to incorporate these at the start when building the bed than later on. Use one-third sand, one-third top soil, and one-third compost. The soil in this area is mostly clay, so adding gypsum to the bottom of the hole helps break it up and make it porous.

 

Check your status on the tetanus booster. It needs to be taken every ten years. According to the Consulting Rosarian Manual, some doctors recommend rose growers to have one every five years. The Clostridium tetani soil borne bacteria produces toxin 50 times that of cobra venom. A thorn prick wound can be lethal on unvaccinated individuals with a fatality of 45 percent to 55 percent. 

 

Now you can look forward to good times as it is only 2 more weeks for spring to arrive!