Preparing Different Kinds of Roses for Winter
We have Joe in east canton, ‘I have Knockout roses, I have Lenten roses, I bought some hybrid tea roses from your store, followed Dave’s instructions, they survived. My question is the three different roses. How and when do I prepare them for winter?’
So we’re getting to that time, we do want a frost to happen on those because that causes them to go to sleep for the winter time. We want to allow the plant to naturally go to sleep, and then after it’s dropping its foliage and becomes dormant. We just have the canes or the stems still left standing there.
As the leaves come down here beginning in November, we’re going to take some leaves and put them around and create a little bit of protection. Act like a triple pane window with a stack of leaves there and kind of insulate the stem and the root system for the wintertime. You don’t want to do it until it goes dormant.
Everybody will have a different answer there as to how much. You know your site better than anyone else. I have roses on the south side of my house, it gets reflective heat, and so it’s not as cold as if I would have roses on the east side of the house, where even in the winter it’s only going to catch a little bit of morning sun. So the soil is going to freeze a little deeper there. But I would say if you’re piling it up on the canes, six inches, eight inches, that’s going to create a nice barrier and lock the temperature more constantly in the ground.
And a lenten rose, you’re not going to do much with it. They are pretty much evergreen, only a rose in name. They do bloom very early in winter, sometimes they bloom in February, so you don’t really want to do much with that. Most of that foliage is going to stay a little bit. Usually what I do in the springtime, I’ll just kind of cut the leaves that kind of die off a little bit. You can just leave that one alone.
I would not cover it because you want to make sure that that’s because it blooms very early. Unless the leaves are really brown and kind of tired looking, you can cut those off. But the ones that are green I would leave because it is feeding. It’s feeding the plant and that is one that stays semi evergreen.
Honestly, you don’t have to do anything with those. It’s more like a perennial. They’re very very tough and they actually like the snow. They’ll push right up through the snow and bloom.
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