RoseBlush1 said:Steve ...
I would not recommend holding back water to avoid stimulating growth. Roses are not drought tolerant plants and withholding water puts them into "survival mode".
RoseBlush1 said:
There are many variables that have to come into play at the same time to trigger growth. It's not only ONE variable or even two variables because each rose is different.
RoseBlush1 said:
This year my roses got pruned all winter with the deer chomp method of pruning. This did not stimulate growth. We also got over fifty inches of rain. This did not stimulate growth. In fact, my first flush was about a month later than usual in spite of the plants receiving what we have been taught would stimulate growth because the other variables were not in play. Even the species roses growing all around my property bloomed a month late.
RoseBlush1 said:
My average last frost date is mid-May, but my average HARD frost date is mid-March. It is the hard frost date that is significant because a hard frost is a killing frost.
I have been re-reading LeGrice's book while I have been playing catch-up in my garden. He spends a lot of time writing about when and how to prune and, more importantly to my mind, why to prune.
With Margie's nor'easters, the temperature fluctuations are strong indicator that multiflora is not a good rootstock for her garden.
RoseBlush1 said:
I don't know what the ph of the soil is in your garden, but if it is alkaline, that would be a strong indicator that multiflora would not be an ideal rootstock for your garden. In Margie's first post, she quoted LeGrice as saying, " A further disadvantage is its dislike for alkaline soil."
Another variable ..![]()
RoseBlush1 said:
Unfortunately, the information that Maragie got from Kim and from LeGrice's book is not readily available, so people are purchasing roses without having the necessary information to make a good buying decision.
How would you recommend I treat the roses to avoid stimulating growth? You said earlier that roses do not put out new growth when they have insufficient water. Is it better to have a plant that dies completely stone-cold dead because it has generated frost-tender new growth too early, or to have a plant that goes into early May slightly retarded in from lack of water?
Just, please, name precisely the variable that would delay growth until the danger of frost is over. Maybe I can dig them all up and put them in a refrigerator until mid-May? Or employ haystacks like the ones immortalized in Monets famous paintings?
Yes, and you had fifty degree days while we had seventy degree days in March and April. Our spring days this year were a full ten or fifteen degrees warmer than yours. While our nights were equally cold. Many cold hardy roses did not go fully dormant here. Mme Alfred Carriere did not finish losing fall foliage until most of the new foliage was in place in mid April.
(Yes, watering in March and April definitely helps the hardy floribundas and shrubs. It even helps the cold hardy Kordes HT roses. But because it stimulates early growth it kills HT roses that "need spring freeze protection".)
And of course, every rose responds differently. We define hard frost in a particular way, sometimes because of specific connections to the physical world. Zero degrees Fahrenheit was defined as the lowest temperature one could bring of a saturated saline solution to before it froze, whereas thirty two is where pure water freezes. So there is a sense in which freezing is a range of temperatures from zero to thirty two degrees Fahrenheit. So it is silly to make too big a deal of the formal definition of hard frost.
Is there any authority who makes a distinction between leaves generated on old hard wood and leaves generated on new canes or new soft growth at the ends of old hardened canes? I ask because in my climate the former tend to get through much cooler weather than the latter. It may be a full ten or even twenty degrees Fahrenheit difference.