Planting Old Fashioned Roses
Joe in East Canton asks, ‘I never tried to grow long stem roses, I can grow knockout roses but that’s kind of cheap, so long stem roses when should they be planted? Are they hard to maintain? Are they expensive? Should I avoid this? I just want to put them in my beds and in my vegetable garden.’
I don’t think they’re any harder to maintain than a standard knockout rose. I’ve never seen knockout roses that look good without being sprayed. You’ll find that also to be true with the old-fashioned roses, the long stem cutting roses, they still need to be sprayed to keep the insects and fungus off of them so that they look nice.
They are both heavy feeders, so you’ll fertilize them both very very strongly with an all season or even a liquid feed. Then in the winter time you do want to pile some leaves around the base of the cane, that actually helps insulate it a little bit in the winter time once everything’s gone dormant.
When you’re planting I would recommend using Sweet Peat or a peat moss, or some sort of soil amendment to add to that, because they do look like a really rich nutrient rich soil.
Well about 50% your soil and about 50% whatever soil amendment you choose, compost manure or sweet peat is a good one. You can actually blend all season fertilizer into the soil because it can lay against the roots of the rose and it’ll help it even more.
It depends whether you want them to grow together as a solid hedge. You can plant them this time of year; anything that’s in a container at a garden center will always do better in the ground than in the container, and this also gives it a long time to root into the soil before that first winter. So now is an excellent time to plant them, and just making sure you use the right soil amendment and the fertilizer is key to success there.
They very much like afternoon sun a lot, a lot of sun so like six to eight hours. They’re like peppers and tomatoes. They love that heat.
As long as you give them the right conditions, they’re not any harder to take care of than the Knockout roses. They’re just kind of finicky, they’re kind of specific on what they like.
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