This is our favourite time of year for only one reason – the roses!!!
What would we do without them? What isn’t there to love about roses? Their timeless beauty is proof of their popularity. They fill your garden with perfume and from bud to bloom, roses delight us, whether clambering over a trellis, an old brick wall, lighting up the flower bed or simply covering the ground.
If you are new to roses, you may think this beautiful bloom requires chemicals to control the insects and diseases that bug them. We are here to report that it is possible to grow stunning and healthy roses without using chemicals. Mark has been growing roses in his garden for 25 years without the use of pesticides. He has more than 75 roses in his collection, and he does not spray any of them.
Grow roses the natural way
Buy roses that are naturally disease and insect resistant. These words, when written on the tag of a Canadian-grown rose, are golden. A rose variety that carries on with its business of flowering and attracting butterflies and songbirds to your garden without surrendering to black spot, powdery mildew and aphids (to name a few of the potential enemies of the rose grower), is a winner in anyone’s books.
Change your habits. Sometimes, the ‘problems’ with roses are the result of the things we do to grow them. Black spot and powdery mildew? Water only at the bottom of the plant to avoid wetting the foliage, and water in the morning, so that the sun burns off surface moisture. Above all, allow the soil to get dry between waterings to about five cm down. This is most important of all.
If you have a persistent problem with insects or diseases on your roses, use an all-natural solution. Diseases? Use garden sulphur or a Bordeaux mixture for control. Insect problems? You will be surprised at how many of them can be dealt with nicely using insecticidal soap. Give aphids a stiff blast of water from the end of the hose to rid your garden of them. Or, just ignore them and let the birds and carnivorous insects such as praying mantis, devour them.
Mulching. Remember to add at least two inches (five cm) of shredded bark mulch at this time of year, which helps deter weeds and retain soil moisture. As the season progresses, you will want to keep your roses blooming for as long as possible. When the flowers fade, the roses will set seed, which slows the production of new flowering shoots. Remove these blooms to fool the plant into producing more flowers. This process is called deadheading. This form of summer pruning involves removing the finished bloom at the abscission layer, which is the slightly swollen section of the stem below the bloom. In the past, it was the practice to remove the bloom far lower down the stem, but it has now been proven that retaining maximum foliage on a rose promotes a better performance and appreciably more flowers.
The ‘perfect’ rose
We hear a lot from the organic producers of apples, tomatoes, and all manner of edibles that we need to look a bit differently at the fresh food we consume: We need to accept that not everything we eat has to look like a perfect picture. We suggest the same is true for flowering plants as well, including roses.
Changing our standards is another solution to insect and disease-damaged roses. The perfect, blemish-free rose may not be the only rose worthy of our attention. We have seen some very fine flowers born on thorny stems with some black spot on the leaves.