Caring for Your Roses—
A Very Rewarding Task

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There are many small things that have to be done to keep your roses looking their best, but all of those small things mean one thing: beauty and wonderful scents in your garden, and in your home.

Here are some great tips for the regular upkeep of your roses:

1. Prune your roses in the early spring. Or at least once other plants start budding, because the buds will eventually become new branches.

Cut the dead and damaged branches first. Next, cut all but five of the leftover healthy branches. They should end up at about the thickness of a pencil.

Cut the bushes by approximately one-third or one-half, depending on how tall you want them. Cut above the outward facing buds, that is, the buds on the outside of the rose bush. This will help the bud to grow upward, which will make the center of the bud open up for better air circulation and shape.

Always sharpen your hand shears before pruning, and prune the climbing roses with caution. The branches have a tendency to overlap and you wouldn’t want to prune the wrong branches.

2. Mulching is necessary because it helps to keep your maintenance down a bit. Mulching requires your roses to need a lot less watering, weeding and helps prevent diseases. The best mulches are organic ones like wood chips, pine needles, and grass clippings.

3. Keep the area around your roses cleared to ensure enough circulation, which helps to keep rose diseases to a minimum.

4. Water your roses often, but lightly. When you water them, avoid directly watering the foliage, which can cause fungal diseases. Water the roses at the roots.

5. Protect your roses during the winter months by adding a few extra inches of soil to the base of your roses. This should provide the extra needed heat in the winter.

Avoid the white plastic cones when doing your winter protection because they trap too much heat during the winter thaw. They are also very unattractive.

Pruning Your Roses

Pruning is one of the most needed and the most annoyingly difficult tasks that goes with caring for your roses. It takes a steady hand to ensure the best possible roses that you can get.

Pruning your roses rids them of dead and damaged pieces, and teaches the new growth to grow in the correct outward-facing direction. This gives your roses lots of circulating air to thrive in.

Here is a list of the proper techniques to guide the pruning process:

• Soak your pruning shears in equal parts of water and bleach. This will help to protect your roses from diseases and insects.


• Pruning in the early spring, just after the snow melts is best. However you want to do it before any new growth appears. The best time would be when the buds are swelled, or red.


• Hand shears are the best tool for pruning the smaller branches. (about 4 ½ inches thick) Loppers are best for the branches that are thicker or the thickness of a pencil. This will make it easier. You should use a heavy pair of rose gloves to avoid the thorns.


• Prune the winter protection that you set up, such as cones, burlap, and mounded soil.


• Get rid of the dead wood first, the wood that is black inside as well as out).


• Next, get rid of the thinner wood, the stems that are thinner than a pencil.
  
• Cut all of the branches that cross or overlap one another because these are often diseased or will become so.


• Of the remaining healthy branches, keep five. These are often dark green. You will want to make your rose bushes fluted or vase-shaped, with an open center, and keep them the branches from touching or overlapping each other.


• Cut healthy canes to be about one to four feet long, or whatever size that you prefer.


• Cut roses properly so that they stay healthy. Cut so that the bud is facing the outside of the bush and at a 45 degree angle that slopes outward so that you can keep promoting the outward growth.


• You should use bypass pruners that work like scissors and not the anvil types because the anvils crush the stems and make the roses more prone to diseases.

Revive Wilting Roses in Vases

With all of the possible diseases that a rose can pick up, you might think that anybody would be crazy to even plant them. They are such high maintenance flowers that it seems to some to be far too much work just to have a bit of beauty in their garden.

There are a great deal of things that can be done in the garden to help prevent diseases and pests from damaging your roses. It seems like so much to do for flowers that only have a life span of about 6-10 days. Of course a healthy bed of roses will constantly produce new buds.

Roses look so beautiful in any room that they sit in. They add an elegance that is unsurpassed by any other flower.

But there's the problem of wilting and drooping roses once they are placed in vases.

As beautiful as roses are, they have a certain vulnerability that is common to every flower. They are prone to sag, droop and wilt after a few days' exposure in a vase. Anybody who would like to preserve that beauty for as long as possible might think that it's hopeless.

Here is how you can save your roses if this happens to you.

1. Take your roses from the vase.

2. Separate the roses, and keep them submerged in lukewarm water as you do it.

3. Make a fresh cut on the stem, again while it remains in the water, because you don’t want to get air into the stem.

4. Take each flower, one by one and roll it in newspaper and close the paper with a rubber band to keep it from unrolling.

5. Put each rose while still wrapped in the newspaper in a sink or tub filled with water and let it soak for several hours while still separated from the other flowers.

6. Once they have soaked, unwrap them carefully, and place them in a vase of fresh warm water.

7. If you want to preserve the health of your roses, put some 7up soda in the water to help prevent bacteria clogging the stem.

Extra tip: Roses droop for one of two reasons. Either they had been cut too early when put into the vase, or they may have been out of water too long before putting them into the vase.