My Hybrid Tea Roses Aren’t Coming Back, What Should I Do?
Joe in East Canton says, ‘hey, I planted some hybrid tea roses just before it got so dry last year. Kept them moist. We got a few blossoms. Everything was good. Should they be waking up now? You talked about the knockout roses. What about the hybrid tea roses?
Yeah, they should be waking up. They may be a little slower than the shrub roses, which would be your knockouts and your drift roses. They have a tendency to be a little bit more robust and come back a little quicker.
But here in the next two weeks, if you’re not seeing growth on that by the second week of May, take your pruner blade and scratch that cane. If that cane’s still green underneath the old stems that are still there from last year, if that’s not green underneath, it’s probably not coming back. And so you want to trim that deadwood off.
Sometimes they do die down and they will come back right from the ground. That is not uncommon when we have a hard winter. And to protect the canes next year in the fall, you can actually mound leaves around them. It acts kind of like a triple pane window and insulates the base of those roses a little bit. And if they don’t come back, our new hybrid tea roses are going to be coming in the first week of May here.
They still might push. I would fertilize them right now. Definitely use that all season on there. Roses are super, super heavy feeders. So you definitely want to go ahead and put at least three scoops of that all season on each plant.
Before Memorial Day, you’re going to know the answer. I’d say about the second week of May, once we’re through this next little cold snip that’s coming here, you’ll know by mid May. And if you do want to replace them with hybrid teas, you don’t want to wait too long. Because just like us, all nurseries, we’ll get one shot of them in the spring and then that’s it. If they’re not coming back and you want to replace it, if you want a specific variety, I wouldn’t wait.
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