Sounds like you got to see some fabulous gardens! I joined our Rose society in hopes to tour some gardens but we never made any of the tours and then covid came up.

I did have better luck talking to people at the High Country Roses green houses and got invited to tour some rose gardens that way. It is fun to see what others have success with.

Good luck with your new strategy. Take some before pictures this year and then you can take some after pictures when you've implemented the new strategies.

Cynthia, that was really enjoyable reading your experience of rose growing. I've stated many times I'm perfecting more mistakes through the years. Fortunately no one around here grows magnificent roses so my stunted roses have looked pretty good to me. If it just wasn't for the outrageously great photos on Rose Forum...

Well , now your roses will be as good or better than the Rose Society members.

And after reading your tips, my poor roses might become prize winners too.

Cynthia, boy we are always learning arent we . What a kick to see healthy, roses that you wouldn't have expected to survive much less thrive.

Thanks so much for sharing

Cynthia - so good to see you posting! Talk about a good post...you've got quite the sense of humor. :) :) Did you get their organic fert. recipe?

Cynthia,

First and foremost, great to have you posting again! i agree, we are always learning something new in the garden. so much interesting information in your post, it makes me want to join my local rose society, so I can tour the gardens! Can you please share what they put in their custom fertilizer meal mix?

Have you read the HMF posts from Digger Dave? He and his wife garden in Montana zone 5a, I was always amazed by how they grew some of the best looking roses anywhere, including some of the most tender varieties, too. They seemed to buy whatever was locally available, and that meant grafted on Huey. Looking at their pics help inspire me to get back into rose gardening, just knowing such great looking plants could be possible . Unfortunately they haven’t posted in a while, but all the charm and good info is preserved on the web.

Great to read your observations. Sounds like your rose club is a great experience. We don't know what we don't know and we can't find out without new experiences.

I see differences among grafted roses. I think multiflora rootstock does better here 9 NC) than Dr. Huey.

@erasmus_gw , I have similar observation for multiflora rootstock in zone 7a VA with acidic clay. Dr. Huey takes 2 seasons to establish for me where as multiflora starts with first season (5 ft plus growth).

Mind blowing experience you had, Cynthia, to the tenth degree, I would say!

Your no spray mode regarding black spot would be the death knell for my roses if I had not implemented a black spot resistant/free replacement program a couple years back. There are just a handful of 'spotters,' left to replace, unfortunately my much beloved Lady Ashe's neck is in the guillotine being one of them, but so be it.

Remembering and still very grateful for all the excellent recommendations you painstakingly outlined for me a couple years back...Thanks again!

Now, if I could find an effective organic rose midge fly control, I would be on top of the world. Seems like my return to biweekly spraying with Imidacloprid will be resumed....soil drenching this spring went disastrous big time. Either I used too little, too dilute a solution, or drenched too late into spring. Anyway, spraying puts a tiny fraction of Imidacloprid into the environment compared to drenching....I just dislike the drudgery of spraying, especially late into the growing season when it's needed the most. A battery sprayer could help a lot, hope to study up on this option over winter. I only need a gallon capacity one.

Hope all your game plan changes prove to be great successes!

Moses

In my zone 7 dry and hot, alkaline soil, Dr Huey and multiflora rootstock do about equally well, though I'd give a slight edge to Dr Huey. But my grafted roses outperform my two own root roses on all counts. Diane

Cynthia, the older I get, the more I discover I don't know - about anything! What a lucky chance to talk to that lady. Good luck with your new knowledge. I hope you get time to post some photos. I've missed seeing your garden of a thousand roses. Trish

Cynthia,

Do you think that the prime, two yr. old, grade A #1 grafted roses available by mail order or in better quality local nurseries, are more equivalent to a well grown 3-4 yr. old own root bush, which is not a commercial option to purchase outright. We have to get an own root to its 3-4, yr. point in our gardens, not in commercial growing fields, grown under ideal propagating conditions?

For example: I purchased a couple Easy Spirit roses from High Country Roses earlier this season. Kept one, gifted the other. They were in quart size pots, but truly, they could not have been more than 6 months old....and that's a stretch. Mine made its first flower here in Pittsburgh, and there's no way that wasn't its first bloom on earth so far. By no means am I complaining. I hold High Country Roses in almost reverential deference. It's great to have such an extensive selection of roses and great nursery ownership at our disposal.

My little trooper Easy Spirit has just had its third flush of blooms (really still buds), just pinched to help it gain size quicker. It is totally BS free....looks extremely promising as a keeper.

If this little rose was field grown in, say Tyler, TX, for the next 3-4 years, and be equivalent to a grafted, 2yr. old grade A, #1 Easy Spirit at that time, I think they both would perform equally well in any garden setting.

What do you think?

Moses

Thanks for all the responses folks! Mmmm12 I have been grateful that my local rose society values garden growing of roses not just exhibiting, though they tend to emphasize the roses that show well. I'm looking forward to showing them the beauties of OGRs and shrubs and hybrid musks and polys when they visit my yard for a breakfast next June. Berrypie thanks for the encouragement - I consider the humbling experience in other yards as a challenge rather than discouragement. If their roses can look that good so can mine (within reason). Kristine makes that point well that always learning can be a good thing and I want to keep doing so.

Carol & Ben - I'll have to check with someone to find out the organic fertilizer recipe they use. They get a local feed shop to mix the ingredients and then they sell it at cost ($25 for 25 pounds which is cheaper than Rose Tone). It's a fine textured powder that smells good and doesn't seem to burn anything.

Ben, I appreciate the welcome back and I absolutely love the posts on HMF by Digger Dave and Deb. In my records I keep a one-line summary for each rose about key elements including comments on HMF and here about rose performance. Several of my posts have key Digger Dave comments that I treasure because of their insight and application to my yard. They stopped posting pictures about 2016 as far as I can tell and I'm hoping everything is OK.

Sheila - with climate change and more extremes every year I think all of us need to keep learning no matter our location. Things that might have worked 5 years ago might no longer apply and I'm getting much more creative with mulching and watering given our increasingly longer stretches between good rains in the summer.

Erasmus, Tututara and Diane - I know that multiflora doesn't like alkaline soils but I find my soil doesn't seem to be too alkaline for it. We have loamy clay so multiflora seems happy enough here, as opposed to places like California (even though it takes an act of God to turn hydrangea blooms from pink to blue here). Dr. Huey seems to fade faster and may be more likely to fail here, but that may be the health of the original plant if I plant body bags. I've had some body bags do fantastic things - World Peace is one I've never seen for sale but the once locally - and it's a terrific rose with stunning colors.

Trish - thanks for the good wishes! I've missed posting pictures too and getting the warm responses from people here that help keep me encouraged during the low spots in the gardening year.

Moses lovely to hear from you and your comments are gracious as always. I can get away without spraying here because of the "dry" part of "hot and dry Nebraska" in the summer, but I do sympathize with the depth of blackspot problems further east from me. I rather think we're starting to get midge damage out here but it's not bad enough to cause undue grief. Japanese beetles - well, I just don't expect any actual blooms in July any more.

As for the equivalence of a 3-4 year old own root to a grafted younger rose, it seems entirely plausible. The robust HTs and flori own roots that I have bloom pretty well and since I have to bury the graft I figure that most of my established grafted roses have gone own root over time. I still love buying own root roses and we have fantastic vendors like Roses Unlimited and Long Ago Roses and Northland and High Country Roses and Burlington and Antique Rose Emporium and ... well you get the picture. I don't hesitate to buy from any of them for any roses that I want that they sell. It's just that I look elsewhere first for the HTs and floris now in grafted form. Even this past two years I've bought some own root HTs that have done fine and I'm sure I'll continue to do so in the future.

I just have to temper my expectations and know that I'm zone pushing when I do so. Speaking as a zone 5 person who still grows one long-surviving tea (Maman Cochet) I'm quite familiar with the hazards but potential joys of zone pushing.

Cynthia

Moses, my Easy Spirit just arrived from High Country. It will be fun to compare notes.

I am looking forward to reading through this thread and responding! but am in a hurry now; hope to add my 2 cents tommorrow...

For some reason Houzz won't let me "like" your post, Sheila, but I do, as well as that of Cynthia.

I can really relate about the own-root versus grafted thing. In the last few years it seems that all of my newly planted roses just don't want to really take off and grow. At first I assumed that this was due to our ever-worsening summers-way hotter than before-and drought, but then it also occured to me that in the last few years I've started planting out only potted roses. So I looked on internet and found an article which said that it does take potted roses longer to establish, because they've already developed roots in the pot, and once you plant them out, instead of working on rooting, they think of blooming. So this fall I bought some bare-roots (grafted) from Barni and have planted them out directly, as I used to do. So we'll see what happens. I do realize that my lack of access to running water makes it impossible for me to water my roses as much as I'd like; there's not much I can do about that. I, too, have been concentrating on "feeding the soil" rather than the plant, but in this aspect I'm sort of handicapped, too, since I can't use organic fertilizers that contain bone, blood ,or fish- these things attract the badgers, and they are SO damaging. So I'm stuck with non-organics. But I plan to be more generous with what I can use,just to see.

”We’ll see if I can have a great spring flush in 2023 now that I've got these "new" strategies and have mostly recovered from pruning every last one to the ground to counteract RRD two years ago. ”

How did it go?

Hi Bart Bart - glad these observations were interesting even if it might not apply to you in Italy. On another thread we've mused about the role of water or lack of it for you in helping a rose succeed in its first year and bloom well after that. If you don't have access to the water you do the best you can and experiment with what works well for you. We have ample evidence here on GW roses that different methods work for different people in different places. I wonder if the Soil Moist crystals are available and could help roses recover from being transplanted (I buy a generic version here in the US and put a tablespoon or two in rose planting holes at the bottom).

Rifls, thanks for the check in about my RRD strategy. I'll have to resurrect that sad thread about my RRD journey as I reached inescapable conclusions. I had to dig out all 850 roses because RRD was just too well established everywhere. That was a totally exhausting and emotional March for 2023 and I spent all of last year spraying sprouts from surviving rose roots that didn't come out completely from digging. I did finally identify the culprit of a neighbor with roses that had RRD - not classic symptoms initially but unmistakable once they got further into the season and showed characteristics. Thankfully she dug them out - I offered to help (what's another 25 roses to dig) but she did it for herself.

I have learned one additional lesson to add to the 3 obvious lessons above (OK, two):

4. I can't garden happily without roses. I have no "rose resistance" in my genetic makeup I guess, and I have around 150 roses in pots overwintering in kiddie swimming pools covered by oak leaves ready to plant this spring. Not to mention an embarrassingly large number of roses on order for spring 2024 and counting...

5. I can now identify subtle signs of RRD. I mentioned learning some things above, but I'm still stupid enough to plant roses :) I had around 15 successful years before RRD Armageddon so I'm hoping for at least another 15 peaceful years. I am better at identifying very early symptoms of RRD, so that's a 5th point that I've learned. I hope not to continue learning that one, however.

Forgot a 6th lesson that I learned from observing rose gardeners around me, that's another "duh" point that I hadn't appreciated.

6. Roses want water - lots of it. The more petals (think Austins), the more water. We used to have regular rains 10-15 years ago and I could get by without watering except a bit in August. Now in March and April we can go all spring without measurable rain. Most years we're at some level of drought, and while most well established roses will survive it (reluctantly) they'll hunker down to conserve mass and neither put on height or bloom. They need regular and deep watering to flower, and that's the point of planting roses (as opposed to living barbed wire). One of the most impressive rose gardens I visited of a society member last year had wardrobe sized Austins that he was giving away (me me me!!) to make room for garden shed sized Austins that needed more room. The primary difference in his yard and mine? Water, lots of it. I took his advice for his hand-me-down roses (with MASSIVE root systems) and watered the heck out of them after planting in November (what, NOVEMBER? they won't survive). Every one of them survived the winter of 2022. Then I had to dig them out from RRD in March 2023. Blerg! At least I discovered how to make them thrive.

Cynthia