Thanks for the thorough explanation of the reasons behind the watering habits, Lyn - glad I could get most of it appropriate for general application. I'm a trial and error gardener for the most part, and fertilizing has been heavy on the "error" side of rose gardening, so I tend to be cautious with any type of fertilizer. I guess you can't wait till the weather cools off in warm zones or you'd never fertilize all summer, eh? It helps that we have pretty good loamy soil to start with, so I don't have to fertilize beyond some alfalfa and organic mulch.
Ray, there are a lot of terrific mail order nurseries that give more value for the money than Heirloom, and Roses Unlimited is high up on my list of preferred companies. I do a bulk order from them yearly (used to be 66 roses, now 72 roses) that gives me a 10% discount plus reduced shipping so I get to explore some of their less common varieties when ordering that's been fun. Chamblees and Antique Rose Emporium also send nice sized gallon roses for reasonable costs. The Cadillac of bare root rose ordering is Palatine in Canada (amazing bare roots and they ship to the US just fine) - Regan and Witherspoon also do good bare roots, and Hortico has small bare roots but accurately labeled ones (a huge improvement over 6-8 years ago) so they get my business too. Among the smaller potted roses, I order from Burlington (very economical prices/shipping and some uncommon roses), Long Ago roses (ditto on both comments), High Country Roses, Northland, and Rogue Valley (though their stock is considerably reduced over what it used to be). Angel Gardens and A Reverence for Roses are good companies but they tend to emphasize warm weather roses that don't do well for me. There are other vendors I order from that have been a bit hit and miss.
In terms of a "reasonable price" for a rose, it's all a matter of what the rose is worth to you I guess. If anyone would sell Bella Renaissance that I've desperately tried to replace for about 6 years since it died in a drought, I'd pay the ridiculous Heirloom type prices without blinking. In general, I haven't found that any of the vendors listed above charge more than $20/rose plus whatever shipping costs to your region, and with sales it can be considerably less than this. I know Heirloom makes a deal about how shipping is free for their roses so the high costs make sense, but there's no company above that charges $13-$20 per rose for shipping to match Heirloom's gallon prices of $33-40/rose, and many of them are much less. I probably average about $23 a rose with shipping (partly because I almost never order only one rose so the shipping costs drop with multiples), and that's about what my best local nursery charges for their potted roses if I drive up to Omaha. Even the big box stores like Lowe's charge about $20 for Easy Elegance roses (well worth it - they do fabulous in our zone), though the bare root roses are less (and comparably lower quality).
Cynthia
