Roses with Pale & Holey Leaves
Mike in North Canton. ‘Hi, good morning. I have a question about roses that we planted last year. Roses themselves are pretty abundant, but the leaves are rather anemic and they have holey leaves. I can still see green fertilizer beads on the surface.’
Okay, sometimes the green beads take about 18 months to two years to break down, so sometimes when you are doing it multiple years in a row, it looks like there is more down than there is. Now, with the excessive rain, sometimes that also leaches the nutrients out of the soil. You can use a liquid feed on roses along with the granular that is down. Roses are very heavy feeders.
They’re like tomatoes or my Labrador, they are always hungry. So go ahead and use that, like a Jax Bloom Booster. It will encourage the plant to continue to flower and the liquid fertilizer works much, much quicker. Within a few days of adding the liquid fertilizer, the leaves will absorb that iron and it will turn green again.
Now, the holes in the leaves are pretty common as well. I have been spraying my roses at home already. I use the 3-in-1. I spray late in the evening so I do not negatively affect the bee population. It absorbs and runs through the sap system of the plant and protects it from the inside out. With roses, it is almost a necessity to do some spraying with them to keep them in tip-top shape.
I make at least two applications, about 7 to 10 days apart. Again, I always spray in the evening hours when the wind dies down and most of the bees are kind of back to their homes. Two applications, about 7 to 10 days apart, and then you keep an eye on it throughout the summer and occasionally may have to do another application as we get deeper into the summer.
3-in-1 is what we are using. It is a bio-advanced product, it is a great product. It protects against fungus and it also protects against insects. Kind of a multi-front attack there.
My roses took it pretty hard on the chin this year. We had a pretty tough winter. It is not uncommon that the plants struggle a little bit coming out of a hard winter. The fertilization is huge for helping them get going again. And then, if we have some heat and dry temperatures, that would also help. That has been slow to come this year.
The roses are naturally going to be a little slower to react. They are not drawing up the nutrients as quickly as when it is hot and dry.
There are lots of different classifications of roses. We have some of the specialty roses, those would be Hybrid Teas, Grandifloras, Floribundas. Those are the old-fashioned roses. And climbers as well. Then, we have a newer type of shrub rose, which would be more your Knockout than your Drift Rose. There are lots of different colors of Knockout and Drift Roses. They stay much smaller than the old-fashioned roses. They have a smaller leaf, usually a little waxy cuticle on the leaf, so it is more disease resistant. But, this year, with as much rain as we have had and the cooler temperatures, we have been having to spray for fungus on both the shrub roses and the old-fashioned roses as well.
Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).
