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By JOHN A. STARNES Jr. © St. Petersburg Times, published March 31, 2001
Exhibitors who enter blooms in spring competitions often begin pruning in late January, but for the average home owner who wants beautiful roses to cut for bouquets, early spring is just fine. Roses of all kinds love full sun, rich, moist, mulched soil and a hard pruning, ideally in late winter that removes about the top half of each bush. Since this year has been unusually chilly, you can take advantage of an extended pruning season. Menhaden fish meal from a feed store sprinkled all over the rose garden supplies all known plant nutrients. Apply it as heavily as you'd put Parmesan cheese on spaghetti if you were very fond of Parmesan. Don't worry; the fishy smell fades in a week or so. Many folks also give their rose garden a generous sprinkling of dolomitic limestone each spring, to make sure the soil doesn't get too acid, and toss 1 to 2 cups of Epsom salts around the root zone of each bush to encourage plump, red new basal shoots to form for denser growth.
Many folks enjoy the faint barnyard aroma, and nothing thrills a rose bush after a hard pruning more than horse manure. Such a deep mulch layer will let you easily conform to watering restrictions, with one deep weekly watering trapped in the soil by that cooling layer of organic matter. It also will dramatically improve your sandy soil as it decays. As a tightwad gardener, I love the fact that the manure usually is free for the asking; just look in the Yellow Pages for a horse stable near you. Studies in England confirm that a quick whacking of rose bushes with electric shears or ordinary pruning shears works just fine, even though we've all been told of the necessity of elaborate, laborious pruning methods that can generate huge blooms for exhibitors. If you're afraid to hard-prune roses, remember that they are tough shrubs if well fed. Do your spring pruning after a hard day at work and fighting traffic; put that rage to work in the rose garden. Chopping them back to about knee height is fine, though the old teas and Chinas like to be pruned back by about a third. In any case, you'll soon see that red new growth emerging. Within six or seven weeks, it should bear you a bumper crop of blooms. Aphids, powdery mildew and blackspot can be controlled easily with an old-fashioned lye soap spray. For 25 years, I've used and advocated Octagon all-purpose soap, but Colgate recently moved production to Mexico, where the recipe changed radically. This icon, long used to fight garden pests, poison ivy, cussing children and collar stains, is thus new and unrecognizable. I no longer use it. Other lye soaps work fine. Kirk's Castile has been around for more than 150 years, is free of animal fats (and not tested on animals) and is also very effective as a garden spray. I'm told that kosher soaps are true lye soaps, so I will try those, too. (Modern detergent bars can burn leaves and may not kill pests.) To make a large batch of soap spray concentrate, just set the soap bar on the sidewalk and gently use a hammer to crumble it inside the wrapper. Pour the chunks into a wide-mouth gallon container and fill it with hot tap water. Let it sit for a week, run it through your blender to dissolve any lumps, then pour the thick soapy gunk back into that gallon container for storage, where it will thicken. One cup of this soap concentrate dissolved in 1 gallon of warm water in your garden sprayer will let you kill aphids and powdery mildew on new growth quickly and effectively. It also will suppress blackspot fungus on older leaves once the weather gets hot and humid again. It is a non-burning spray, so feel free to experiment with stronger or weaker solutions. Just be sure to spray each bush till it is dripping, when you won't be watering for a few days. Blackspot lives on the undersides of the leaves, so aim the spray up at them. Using systemic pesticides on roses not only kills off many beneficial insects in the garden that control pests, it also renders the petals too toxic to consider using them in old-fashioned jams and herb teas. Rose petal tea is heavenly, especially with mint added to the brew, so a simple lye soap spray will allow you to harvest petals a week later, after one good watering. Once a week, after a long, hard day, kick off your shoes and cut off blooming branches as long as your forearm to make a casually elegant long-stemmed bouquet for the dinner table. Why? Doing so serves as a constant pruning that keeps the bushes dense and blooming more heavily and reminds you of the heart-stirring beauty and fragrance that have made the rose the queen of flowers. Sources for Kirk's Castile: Many supermarkets, Restoration Hardware, Cracker Barrel country stores (after April 1); phone toll-free 1-800-825-4757; on the Web: www.kirksnatural.com. * * * John A. Starnes Jr. is an avid gardener and rosarian who studies, collects, cultivates and hybridizes roses for the diverse regions of Florida and Colorado. E-mail him at THE.GARDEN-DOCTOR@worldnet.att.net.
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