If you are wanting to know how to care for rose bushs then our long term rose aftercare guide will help ensure new and existing roses in your garden look healthy and perform their best throughout the summer season.
Roses Need Food
Roses put a great amount of effort into growing strong stems and producing lots of flower throughout summer and autumn. This requires lots of nutrients from the soil, therefore feeding your roses on a regular basis will help keep them healthy, strong and give them better immunity to disease. Roses planted in garden borders should be fed twice a year in March and July with 1-2 handfuls of rose feed sprinkled around its base, we recommend Empathy After Plant Rose Feed. Give an extra feed in late May for roses being grown in containers.
To Spray or Not To Spray Your Roses
This totally depends on how good you want your roses to look and perform! Regular spraying of the foliage in summer months before you see any problems will certainly help improve the rose’s performance and aid much cleaner and healthier growth, this will lead to a larger number of blooms being produced. There are various safe and bee-friendly products available, we recommend alternative 3 products: Uncle Tom’s Rose Tonic (a foliar feed and mildew and blackspot spray), Sulphur Rose (for blackspot and mildew) and SB Plant Invigorator (a general all-round foliar feed, pest control and disease resistance spray). These products are safe and non-resistant so can be sprayed on the roses as often as you feel necessary.
For the best control, we recommend spraying roses from April to October with 1 application every 1-2 weeks. You should only spray on early mornings, late evenings or on overcast days, never spray your roses in direct sunlight when it is hot as this will scorch both the flowers and leaves.
Treating Aphids, Greenfly & Other Pests
Greenfly love roses and it will not be uncommon if your roses receive a couple infestations during the season. On the nursery we have to spray every 1-2 weeks during active growth due to our roses being close together. Despite this, it is impossible to guarantee all roses are free of greenfly as their eggs are invisible to the naked eye, it takes less than 2 days for an aphid egg to became an egg-laying adult and female eggs are already pregnant before they hatch! There is no wonder these pests appear out of nowhere! Really severe infestations can weaken flowering stems and the buds may simply wither away.
You can leave birds and insects to feed off the pests, or wait for cooler, wet, windy weather. Alternatively, you can spray them directly on early mornings or late evenings with a bee-friendly product such as SB Plant Invigorator or similar sprays available from your local garden centre. If you prefer a more natural method, wear a rubber glove and simply brush them off between your thumb and finger, or blast them off using a jet setting on your hosepipe attachment.
Deadhead Your Roses After They’ve Bloomed
The rose’s flowers need removing when the petals begin to turn brown after fully flowering, ideally, they need removing before they start to fall to the ground. Leaving the flower heads on will cause the rose to put effort into producing rosehips for the rest of the summer and autumn with no further flushes of flower for that season. Prune off any dead blooms with a pair of secateurs, cutting 2 or 3 leaves below the flower where the stem growth is strong enough to support further large blooms or trusses of flowers.
Apply An Annual Mulch
Apply a well-rotted garden compost or garden manure around the base of the rose to a depth of 3-4 inches. This will help weed control, disease prevention, improve health and give extra moisture retention to the soil. Never use bark or wood chipping under or around garden roses as they harbour and breed disease spores which will attack your roses and may kill them.
Train Climbing & Rambling Roses
To train climbers and rambling roses, use trellis, hooks, wires or nails to train and tie the new, main stems. Tie during spring and summer using rubber coated wire or soft string. Encourage main branches and stems to grow sideways rather that upwards as this will help keep the foliage and flower at a lower height for years to come.
Water Established Roses Regularly
Regular watering will benefit your rose, improve its health and produce more longer-lasting blooms. In hot weather water your rose in the early morning and try to avoid watering the foliage.
Remove Wild Growth (aka Suckers)
The majority of roses are grown by grafting a bud from the mother plant onto a rose rootstock, this gives the rose more health and vigour and produces a stronger plant compared to one grown from a cutting. It’s common for the original rootstock of the bush rose or the stem of a standard rose to produce an entirely different growth stem and flowers from below the grafted bud.
This wild growth will have lime-green leaves and matt finish, and can overtake the growth of the actual grafted rose and, if not controlled, eventually kill it. If you notice this wild growth on your rose, trace it back to the stem and cut it off so it is flush with the stem, this will stop the wild growth from re-shooting. If you find wild growth growing from the ground, let it grow for a couple of weeks until it becomes stronger, then using a thick pair of gardening gloves, pull the growth out from the ground until it snaps cleanly away from the rose’s roots. Never prune these ‘ground suckers’ as they will simply re-shoot again from the point where it was cut.
