CindiKS said:Rpr, wow, that is super helpful! There is a nursery in Canada that ships roses to the U.S. and they have many beautiful roses that would not need to be covered in your area. They are all disease resistant, and would not need spray at all. Palatine is a favorite of many of the people on the rose forum because the roses they send out are huge.
https://palatineroses.com/
This has been a bad year for blackspot in my garden. It is easy to tell which roses are truly resistant, after getting 10.5" rain in one week. The Palatine roses, mostly Kordes and Fryer, are 90% clean!
For five years or so I ordered from Hortico.
They honored they warranty but some of roses they sent were pathetic from the get go, although I nursed a couple to health but then some that looked real good were belly-up the next spring plus after my one large order it seemed two-thirds were on back order for year after year.
Where I am at, I have two gardens now fifty miles apart it can hit thirty below at the south garden and forty below up north so not covering is not an option.
When I just covered them I would have to cut them down to no more then twelve inches so they started from near scratch every year.
A gent down the block buried his every year (he came over one year to see how mom got away without burying hers).
After a couple of hard winters and losing some roses, I decided to try burying them, especially as I had done that for the land-scaper I worked for.
Since then loss rate has dropped to near zero, and now, although it takes a LOT of space, I tip up roses with canes over three feet long.
Now I found that in the spring after you remove the leaves over the buried roses, and sometimes I put a cloth covering on the ground also, it looks like a black mat, or a worm highway.
I thought well, I will just tie some bailing twine on the stems and I will know where they are.
Well, so far every year the bailing twine has disappeared under ground.
I have lost one rose because I forgot it was there and did not find it till the fall while digging a trench to bury another one and a few times a few week after uncovering I will see sprouts coming out of the ground where I missed one.
If you bury a rose and it does not sprout through the ground it probably is on its death bed.
One of the reasons I have not planted more is I realize that then I would lose the area to bury the long canes but I am still going to put more in next year.
For a long time up here we had a discount nursery where I could buy high quality roses at a fraction of the listed price, so losing a rose then was no great bother as I could simply get another nice one.
Sadly it closed a few years ago.
The year I got my biggest order I fall planted.
We had a hard, hard, hard freeze. Now obviously the garden was not covered, you are supposed to wait for a truly hard freeze if you just cover them, but I had over a dozen roses in boxes that needed planting.
I went out with an ice chisel broke the ground up, it was frozen solid an inch and one-half down, threw the chunks into the vegetable garden and roto-tilled the area to be used.
My rose garden has very hard black-gumbo, has always been that way and no matter what I do it does not change but it grows nice flowers.
Well the day I planted them there was a freezing drizzle all day but I had no choice so I just kep going. After you get cold and wet to a certain point you actually stop noticing it as no part of your body is any better that the rest.
Well I thanked God I got them all in and got the entire bed covered with leaves.
A week later it was in the seventies and I ended up mowing lawn again that fall.
They looked great the next summer.
