Roses For Mothers Day and How to Care For Them
0:03 Intro
Hello and welcome back to the homegrown horticulture podcast. Today we're going to be talking all things roses. The homegrown horticulture podcast is specifically for the Intermountain West, an area often forgotten about by national gardening companies. If you just found us or have been listening for a long time, welcome, and thank you again.
0:27 Roses Intro
In a former career, I worked at a garden center for nearly 15 years before being hired by Utah State University. While working at the nursery, one thing I always loved was when the roses came out for retail sale, we would have 1000s of roses and dozens of varieties and it was fun to just talk to people about them and ask them what they had grown. One thing that I noticed was that the customers were often confused by the sheer number and types of roses. And it was often confusing trying to figure out what to buy. I attempted to explain to the customers that roses can be classified on how tall they grow, and also how they flower.
1:07 Roses by how tall they grow
And so as far as how tall they grow, I'm going to start with the shortest, which would be miniature roses, which I'm not really going to focus on. They don't seem to do very well outdoors in the Intermountain West.
The next tallest would be ground cover roses, but they're not super common either. They survive just fine. They flower a lot of the summer, but I think it's just the nature of them being thorny, and trying to have to clean them out or if you lose a ball or something in them that sometimes prevents them from being more popular.
Going in ascending order. The next biggest are the bush roses. These can grow just a few feet high and wide to certain species that can grow up to 10 to 15 feet high and wide just depending on the genetics.
The final classification of roses includes the climbers, but these aren't really climbing plans in the true sense of the word. They more just grow really long and need to be supported with a trellising system. The next concept I want to talk about are flowering characteristics.
2:11 Classification of rose flowers
So the first classification are the floribunda roses. These have been bred to be very profuse where one bush can have hundreds of blossoms on it at any given time. Floribunda roses that only grow to three to four feet high and wide are very useful as hedge roses because you can just give them a light haircut and that will cause a new flush of blossoms to come out. They generally bloom from late spring until after the first hard frost in the fall.
Most knockout roses, which is a wildly popular series of hedge and bush roses would be considered floribunda roses. A few other popular floribunda types include Betty Boop, Monkey Business, Sexy Rexy, Hot Cocoa and Lagerfeld.
The next popular classification is called grandiflora rose. Plants classified as grandiflora will have larger showier your flowers but will have fewer flowers than the floribunda and these flowers are usually in clusters of three to five flowers. A couple of very popular grandiflora type flowers include Queen Elizabeth and fame.
The final flower type I want to mention include the hybrid tea roses. When the flowers appear on a rosebush, they appear on a long stem with a single flower. These are the kinds of roses that you find at the grocery store and at florists that you give to others. They're by far the most popular type of roses that we purchase at local garden centers to plant in our yards. Some of my favorite hybrid tea roses include double delight, Mr. Lincoln, Peace, Rio Samba, and Chrysler Imperial. There are so many others out there that will do quite well though. And don't just limit yourself to these that I've mentioned.
3:58 Climbing Roses
I wanted to briefly talk about climbing roses because the flowers can be several different styles, but I wanted to mention a few varieties that I am familiar with. And these include American Beauty, Cecil Brunner, Fourth of July, and Iceberg. Of these iceberg is well loved by many people.
4:19 Climatic Zones
Because this is the Intermountain West there are several concerns about growing roses because they are oftentimes not the best adapted plants and they actually can be quite wimpy. For example, most hybrid tea roses are zone six with some of them coming in zone five and almost none of them at zone four. Most of the Hardy roses or at least roses of the recover well from cold damage are going to be bush roses. And instead of going into dozens of varieties I have included a fact sheet in the show notes from the University of Idaho, detailing cold hardy roses and how to maintain them.
4:55 Iron Defficiency
Roses are also commonly susceptible to iron chlorosis and others. micronutrient deficiencies due to our alkaline soils, instead of going into great detail about how to remedy this the Homegrown Horticulture podcast from three weeks prior details on how to treat iron chlorosis, and I will also include a fact sheet from Utah State University Extension on how to treat it.
5:20 Pests and Diseases
There are several common pests of roses with the most common being aphids, spider mites and thrips. A great way to treat these includes horticultural soaps and oils. These are going to be more friendly to beneficial insects and predators that will eventually hopefully come in and take them out so that you don't have to use harsher chemicals.
There are a number of fungal diseases that can get to roses including powdery mildew. Oftentimes something like neem oil, which is also fairly earth friendly and has low toxicity does a pretty good job at preventing, and maybe even curing powdery mildew infections that are fairly new.
If you go to a local garden center, nursery or farm store, they're probably going to have multiple rose care products on hand. They're oftentimes a combination fertilizer, systemic fungicide, and systemic insecticide. Unless you have roses that you're emotionally attached to just because they might have been grandma's rose the brought from another yard or one that you especially like, these combo products with the fungicides and insecticides are oftentimes not needed. And if you're specifically purchasing them to try to cure a rose, remember that once you buy two or three bottles, that's the cost of a new rose plant. And if you've had problems with this, what I would recommend doing is getting online and finding disease resistant roses so that you're less likely to have to use these products in the future. I have included a fact sheet from the University of Illinois on controlling rose pests and diseases. It is in the show notes.
6:58 Deadheading for Increased Flowers
Modern roses have been bred to continually bloom throughout the summer, but keeping them blooming in the local climate can sometimes be difficult due to our excessively hot and dry weather. To keep roses blooming, it's critical to deadhead them after a flush of blooms have started to fade. To do this on hybrid tea and grandiflora roses, follow the flower stems back along the branch until you start running into leaves. When you find the first set of leaves with five leaflets, you will prune right above those five leaflets. What this will do is cause the rose to send out new growth and this new growth will form new flowers. For warmer areas with the Wasatch friend and the Intermountain West you would stop doing this deadheading sometime in late August. For cooler areas early to mid August would be fine.
In shrub roses, some popular varieties are self cleaning, and so you do not need to deadhead them. A prime example of self cleaning roses includes the knockout series and some of the older but still very useful simplicity series.
8:06 Fertilizer and Irrigation
Some final thoughts on roses as far as fertilization and watering. Once a rose is established, it shouldn't really be allowed to dry out too much although they can be at least moderately drought hardy. What I like to do in an average soil is to water them to a depth of six inches to a foot at least weekly. In sandy soil. You may need to do this more often and in clay soil, you may need to do this a little less often.
As far as fertilization. There are several ways to do this and several options. What I like to do is to just get a bag of 10-10-10 or 16-16-16 or similar and give each rose during the growing season a heaping tablespoon of fertilizer spread under the base of the plant. There are several slow release fertilizers that are very usable such as osmocote and several liquid feed fertilizers from companies like Miracle Gro and others that are also just fine. If you have repeat blooming roses, you don't want to use a lot of fertilizer, it's just more key that they get small doses throughout the season to keep them healthy. And remember the over fertilization will make the roses grow lots of green growth but they will have fewer flowers.
9:21 Planting Warm season Veggies
That's going to wrap it up for roses for this week. But I also quickly wanted to mention that you can probably start getting your warm season crops in if you are in warmer areas of the Intermountain West. I have posted a hyperlink to a website from the USU climate center that gives information on average first and last frost. So you would enter your state and then it will be populated with everywhere that there has been records kept by weather station. warm season crops are generally planted after your average last frost.
9:56 Outro
Thank you so much for listening and for those that celebrate have Happy Mother's Day. I'm deeply appreciative of my mother and my wife and I'm grateful that they are in my life. Have a great day. The homegrown horticulture Podcast is a production of Utah State University Extension. Show music is written by Savannah Peterson, a Utah State University Extension horticulture assistant
Fertilizing Roses
https://web.extension.illinois.edu/roses/water.cfm#:~:text=Spread%20the%20fertilizer%20in%20a,of%20the%20spring%20bloom%20period.
Pests and Diseases of Roses
https://web.extension.illinois.edu/roses/disease.cfm
Roses For Cold Mountain Valleys
https://www.extension.uidaho.edu/publishing/pdf/bul/bul0874.pdf
Average Last Frost Dates
https://climate.usu.edu/reports/freezeDates.php
Iron Chlorosis
https://forestry.usu.edu/trees-cities-towns/tree-care/preventing-iron-chlorosis
