Roses are red, yellow, pink, white and a dozen other colors. Roses are grown in hot houses, in plant pots and in gardens. Roses are romantic and ideal and as I mentioned yesterday, something I always wanted to do. There’s a great channel on the satellite and cable programs called HGTV and I went there for some help with what to plant and how to care for it.
From a rose expert named Norma Booty, I learned the following:
When you’re just starting out to grow roses, you want to choose shrub roses. They work well in a wide variety of soils and are not finicky. While we all associate roses with long stems, those come from hybrids and are the hardest to grow because they have an increased sensitivity to moisture, soil conditions and disease.
So if you’re ready to add some roses to your garden, it’s a great project to work with your children on. They learn how to take care of something as well as how to not over care for their charges.
You want a good spot that gets 8 to 10 hours of sunlight a day. You want good drainage so that you don’t encourage water to sit on the roots and rot them. When you’re ready to plant, you want to dig a hole about three times a wide and twice as deep as your container that houses the rose bush.
The digging part is fantastic fun for your kids. Trust me. My daughter LOVED digging the hole. Once you’ve got the hole, remove your roses from their container, careful especially if your roses have thorns. You want to gently separate the roots and then settle them into the hole.
Now, while you hold the roses steady, have your child gently fill in the area with loose soil. You can add cow manure, compost and peat moss to the combination around the roses. Don’t feed them right away, but do add about an inch or two of water to the area around the roots once a week.
After the first month, you can add some nitrogen rich soil to the area around the roses and rose food. You want to make sure you keep a nice layer of mulch around the roses as well to keep the weeds out and to keep the soil beneath cool.
Now here comes the fun part. Once your roses are settled and growing, you get to trim them and keep them healthy. You can choose to pick your roses and keep them in the house as they bloom or leave them to bloom on the bush. As their bloom fades, trim away the dead excess. That keeps the nutrients and water flowing to the live portions and encourages your roses to keep growing.
Talk to your roses, care for them and get your kids involved. Gardening is a fantastic activity for them and you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor in the beautiful blossoms that will grow.