On Tue, 3 Feb 2004 12:25:38 -0500, "Mark. Gooley"
wrote:


"ed" wrote :
Is it silly to have purchased three roses from home despot
at a "bargain" of 5 bucks a rose? When I go on these
wintertime jaunts to find the first rose of the winter, I look
for the healthiest appearing rose as opposed to a
specific type. Anybody else do this kind of insanity?

I've done it at Home Despot and even at WalleyeMart. Got
one of those red and white things (Double Delight? Fourth
of July? I forget) and a Sonia and a few others in late fall,
bushes almost defoliated by black spot and weather and
whatnot but with healthy new growth on them, marked down
to $2 each. Oh, and I've bought over twenty of those bare-root
waxed things, just as I've confessed in earlier postings,
prices ranging from $2.50 to $5.97, a few even own-root.
I've been putting the bare-root plants into gallon-sized grower
pots -- the survival rate seems to be better when I do that. I
have plenty of room...the only problem is that eventually I
still have to PLANT the roses in the ground, or else keep
moving them up to bigger and bigger ones.

I've had nothing but success in directly planting bare roots into the
ground directly from shipment. I don't even really soak them
overnight, because they're always still moist from the wet paper that
they're packed in.

Of course, all of my bare roots have come from Edmunds and they offer
really robust, healthy bare roots. Also, I have really great soil to
start with. I don't have to do *any* amending other than sprinkling a
little compost in the hole and completely covering the exposed bare
roots with hardwood mulch. This to me is the key to success (as well
as making sure that I wet the mulch daily until they are to be
uncovered, usually about a month). This works in Zone 6b perfectly -
I'm not sure if you'd modify it for Florida though.

Even my quasi-bare roots did well, because I treated them as bare
roots by shaking off all of the sawdusty filler and planting them
exactly as I would the regular bare roots - that is, dig a hole as
deep as it would take to have the crown roughly at ground level,
building a little mound in the middle of the hole and arranging the
bare roots to lay over the mound. The fact that they weren't
Europeanas was a ****er, but they were certainly pretty healthy...

Here are a couple of photos of three Bel Amis about 2 weeks after they
were uncovered:

http://www.pbase.com/image/19804228

This first photo was taken on June 2nd (they were planted on Monday
after Memorial Day and they had actually sat on my porch for several
days, having been delivered that Saturday - I didn't get back in town
until Sunday but was jet-lagged and didn't actually get them in the
ground until the next day). You can see that a dog had already dug
into the mound, uncovering one of the plants. That was my cue that I
could probably uncover the rest of them, which I did a couple of days
later.

Here are the same three plants on 29 July, about a week and a half
into the first flush:

http://www.pbase.com/image/19804079

And here is a week into the second flush, on 29 August.

http://www.pbase.com/image/20859880

( did the bare-root-into-pot shtick with a couple hundred trees
a few years ago...then neglected them.

That's why I don't try to put off planting my bare root roses - I
don't want to end up forgetting about them...

I now have those trees,
most of their roots well below the pots, having pierced a layer
of ground cloth, in a big mass...I've begun hacking them out and
I suspect I'll lose most of them, but I haven't much choice.)

Mark.