Help! My Hybrid Tea Roses Aren’t Blooming!

We have Tom in Massillon, who asks, ‘last year, my hybrid tea roses didn’t bloom well. The plants were big and husky, but they didn’t bloom very much. And you guys told me that there was probably a lack of phosphorus in the soil. So what do I do about that?

Okay. So there’s two different fertilizers I’m going to recommend you use. Roses are like my lab at home. He’s always hungry, and the roses are always hungry. They will eat, eat, eat, and eat some more. So I would recommend using the all-seasons fertilizer you hear us talk a lot on the radio show about. It’s a six-month slow release.

Then there’s a second product you can add. It’s called triple super phosphate. It’s very high in the middle number, which is what’s responsible for making the plant bloom. But roses also need nitrogen. So that’s why I would use the all-season fertilizer. It’ll feed it for the entire growing season. And then you can put the granular, they’re both granulars, You could put the triple super phosphate down to really encourage heavy blooming as well.

So on the bag, it’ll tell you most of the time with shrubs, we’re between three and five scoops. There’s a scoop inside the bag. And with the triple super phosphate, I want to say it’s around a quarter cup. I’d have to double-check the bag on that one, but I’m pretty sure that’s the rate for single shrubs.

The nice thing about that is you only have to do the all-season once in the spring, and you’re done. And then the triple super phosphate usually will do twice a year, spring and fall. I did the triple super phosphate last year, and I used the Jack’s Bloom Booster. It had good results.

It does sound like there’s a lot of depletion of phosphorus. And especially, depending on when you put that in the soil too, they’re really sucking it up now. So you should see results this year. And again, you can use the Bloom Booster, I would say, like in the middle of the season too. You can use that a couple times. Really, anytime you want to water, it’s not going to hurt.

You can put the Bloom Booster on when they’re about to bloom, as they’re setting buds. But really, just anytime you need the water, honestly. Early, mid-May? During the growing season, that’s a good fertilizer to use.

The granular fertilizer I would put down now, the stuff you’re going to mix into the powder that goes into the water, the liquid, that liquid I would wait until probably mid-May to do. But the granular fertilizers absolutely can go down now.

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