How To Care For Your Roses Bushes
Last updated by Annie on: Monday, Mar 1st 2010
Hi, . I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how truly beautiful a flower the rose is. It’s beauty is one of the main reasons why it has been so popular for so long. The history of the rose bush is long and famous and is a recognized symbol for many different things, love for example, all over the world.
It would be safe to say that a garden isn’t truly complete without at least one or two roses bushes. Roses add natural beauty and sophistication to any garden. By learning an implementing the proper skills of rose bush care your roses will reward you with an abundance of beautiful blooms from early summer until the first signs of frost.
Fortunately, growing and caring for rose bushes is an extremely rewarding and fulfilling pastime and when done correctly with the proper knowledge, is also pretty easy. As with most things in life, the more you know and understand about doing something the better you will be at doing it. Growing and caring for rose bushes is no different.
As you would expect, rose bushes come in many varieties with a full rainbow of colors, all different shapes and sizes. Some prefer warmer climates others cooler ones, and so it goes on. However, irrespective of your climate, or the variety you choose, as I’ve already mentioned above, caring for your rose bushes becomes relatively easy once you know how.
Rose bushes require sunlight every day, with six hours being generally considered the optimum amount. This should really be direct sunlight. In other words, the roses shouldn’t be in the shade. You need to make sure the soil in which the rose bushes are planted is also optimum. It shouldn’t contain too much clay or too much sand. See my article on How To Plant Roses Properly for an easy way to test your soil.
Providing your roses with the correct amount of sunlight, planting them in the optimum soil, feeding and watering them properly is all vital but is only part of caring for your roses. Unfortunately, like most plants, roses are no strangers to pests and insects that can damage and harm them. In order to ensure the health of your roses you must deal with these pests swiftly and correctly. They include such insects as caterpillars, rose midge larva, the Japanese Beetle, aphids and many more.
So how do you deal with these annoying pests? Should you be lucky to spot them early, when only a few are on your plants, the quickest and easiest way is to simply pick them off yourself and kill them. However, beware! Just because you have removed the ones you can see, make sure you also remove and discard the leaf you found them on. There is always the change that they have already laid eggs that you cannot see. And always checked the underside of each leaf.
Your local garden center will no doubt have a large selection of both natural and synthetic pest control sprays that us can use on your roses bushes. Please ensure that you read the instructions carefully though and use exactly as instructed.
Something else you could ask your local garden center about is “good bugs and pests”. Yes, not all bugs are harmful and nasty to your roses. In fact some can protect your roses against those harmful ones I mentioned above. Wasps, for example, eat the harmful ones, as can lady bugs.
A part of rose bush care that I’ve noticed many people get wrong is pruning, also known as deadheading, and that’s a great shame because it shouldn’t be. Pruning correctly is vital in the promotion of new growth. Should you simply allow the old flowers to die away, the rose bush will not produce new shoots and without new shoots you have no new flowers. A lot of people simply don’t like cutting off flowers but pruning or deadheading is necessary and you are doing your rose good by doing so. Now don’t just stop at the old flowers. Also remove old twigs.
Take care and enjoy your roses
Annie
