I sent Pat a message yesterday to start an order for spring, and today she replied, saying she could send me three of the roses on my list in just a few days, on November 7th, and put my name on the others for spring.

Now that all of the other nurseries are raising their prices, RU is such a bargain. Most of their big roses are still only $16, and some of the little bands I've been looking at elsewhere have crept up to $21.95 or even more.

Also, now that shipping costs are soaring across the board, RU's charge of $8 per rose to California doesn't seem so high anymore.

I'm getting Chantal Merieux, Prairie Lass, and Cafe. Cafe's one of my favorite roses, but mine's getting played out, so I need a spare.

*sigh* gorgeous. Love it. Love that Cafe. I'm going to wait on locking down my ban on ordering from RU 'cuz of my wishywashy-ness. I want to see how the 20 that I got from them survive the winter. Everyone's deeply mulch (that survived the summer), so I'm just crossing fingers, toes, & eyeballs.

I'll be looking forward to your verdict, Toni.

On second thought, I suppose I might end up ordering before the verdict is in: it's such an irresistible list and I keep hearing good things about their initial quality.

Steve - Their roses come in beautiful. Don't get me wrong, they're very vibrant, very healthy, never any blackspot or any other ickiness and their availability is to die for. They're just sooo teeny for my area! One I got that was a "two year rose" is about 1/2 the thickness of a pencil eraser. Seriously. It never bloomed and I honestly lost it in the mulch. I buried it about 10" deep just to make sure that it survives the cold. I'm just hoping against hope that my English Perfume survives the winter. I've got that one babied as much as I can w/o digging it up & bringing it inside the house.

Toni - About plant size and losing plants ...

Until very recently I have imagined a very good correlation between the size/development of a plant on delivery and its survival in my own garden. Heirloom's smallest roses, for example, tended to die quickly. Grafted hybrid tea roses took longer.

Recently, Zuzu mentioned that she's been seeing that roses from VG are not really doing that well in her garden. I realized that I too have lost a huge portion of plants I got from VG. They would usually die within six months of planting. Right now my garden contains a number of tiny rose plants, mostly from RVR, that have endured punishing conditions over the summer and are still doing well. Most of these are still in their first season. I guess I'll see how they do this winter.

I know the first winter I was here I lost all twelve roses from ARE that I planted in October. And I know that they ship well-developed, tough roses - generally speaking. Lost a lot of fall planted roses the next year, too. So now I know that fall planting is almost always fatal here. Notable exceptions are Parade and Mrs Oakley Fisher.

Mulch is a problem for me. I just don't have the energy to tote it about the garden. Because the only access to the garden is down a flight of eight stair steps, it seems likely to continue being a problem for me to put inches of mulch over the whole garden. Furthermore, with the ground temperature staying relatively high, organic matter burns off pretty fast. I guess I've just about given up on mulch. I'm relying on weeding and plant vigor to make up for my gardening flaws. It almost works.

Now I just have to train the deer to deadhead after the rose has dropped its petals.

Steve - I understand perfectly about toting the mulch around. When I got that 13 CY of mulch delivered, it took me months to move it from the driveway into the back yard, one tote at a time! Pain in the BUTT.. dirty work, bleh! But I noticed that I didn't lose half as many roses w/the mulch as I normally do. that's why I'm crossing fingers, toes, & eyeballs w/the roses I got from RU this past time. They're sooooooooooo teeny compared to a grafted rose. I ended up using yard flags (the flags that like the electric company uses the show where there's lines in the ground so you don't cut into them) to mark the roses that I 100% buried. I found that burying them 100% doesn't hurt them in the winter, so I did that with English Perfume w/the bottomless bucket around it to hold the mulch in place and the rest I just heaped the mulch into a humungo pile. My weather's been odd.. the night time temps have been in the low 30s to upper 20s and daytimes have been almost 60 w/no snow in sight. Again. The beginning of the month looked SOOOOOOOO promising, but the snow's been caught up in the mountains (they had one hell of a blizzard this past weekend) and nothing but desiccating winds down here (again). Saturday morning looks like I'll be spending it watering due to lack of snowfall. I'm sorely tempted to buy a couple of roses from Vintage I couldn't get from Cliff's sell-off, and I'll be growing them inside the house until May when I can plop 'em into the ground.

What about a dog for the deer? I've found that they're not too trainable. They're really pretty, but pretty stupid, too. But they *are* tasty!!!

I'm sure the deer would appreciate a dog, even if they did not find it tasty!

DW won't have pets associated with the house or garden on account of her allergies. Gotta get bambi blaster working again next spring.

Weather here continues to be only slightly more moderate than yours. Light frosts at night, sixties and seventies during the daytime. But the soil right now is moist from rain within the last week.

I know I need to spend some time, effort, and money on mulch. Just haven't quite got there yet.

The main reason I mulch so thoroughly is that I am a minimalist in the garden. Mulch means less work watering (not even possible in many areas) and weeding, and for me mulch is free - the farm produces it as a byproduct of several operations!

Used to order mulch by the CY till I did some arithmetic and saw it was comparable to buy in bags at the big box stores. That is so much easier to tote around.

We are really lucky in that the tree trimming company that clears under lines through town will dump all we want in our yard, for free. They chew it up twice for us, so I get some pretty nice mulch. They put it in an area where I don't have to move it until I need it. If I leave it too long, I have compost, so that's not bad either.

That's the ideal situation!