You've followed all the advice.
Having spoken to your local rose grower and accepted her advice suggesting which particular types of roses will suit your neighborhood and climate, you've made your choices and arrived home with your new rose bushes ready to plant.
As it's Fall, and you had the option of buying either bare-rooted roses or container grown ones, you opted for the bare-rooted roses, because you had more choice and they were marginally cheaper.
You've already selected your site and confirmed that it receives a minimum of 6 hours direct sunlight a day, and the pH balance is ideal for roses because it's between 6.
0 and 6.
9.
Now you're ready to plant them.
The sooner they're in the ground the better.
It's never a good idea to have them hanging around too long once you've brought them home.
We have the bare-rooted roses standing in a bucket of water for a couple of hours before planting just to make sure they don't dehydrate.
Had the weather been unsuitable for planting them right away, you could always have heeled them in until conditions were more favourable.
Heeling in simply means digging a shallow trench, one side of which slopes steeply backwards and then laying your roses in the trench and backfilling it, making sure that the roots and half of the canes are covered well with soil.
This is one way of delaying planting if conditions are too cold and the ground frozen.
Roses are greedy feeders, so despite the soil being naturally a good quality loam, we've still decided to dig in plenty of well rotted manure (cow is best) and plenty of well rotted garden compost too.
These are spread over the area where the roses are to be planted and then dug in well with a garden fork.
As the conditions are ideal we start by digging our hole.
For a normal, field grown, 2 year old rose, the hole really needs to be about 24 inches square and 20 inches deep.
Digging a hole this large makes sure we have adequate room to spread the roots out fully, and the compost immediately beneath the rose is well fed too.
To encourage vigorous rooting, we throw a handful of bone-meal into the soil that we removed from the hole and mix it through well.
Now we move some of the manure/compost/soil mixture back into the hole to a depth of about 12 inches, and form a small pyramid on which we place the rose bush.
We spread the roots as much as we can, and start backfilling.
As we live in one of the milder districts we'll be keeping the bud union of the rose about 1 inch above the soil.
The bud union is where the bud from the cultivated rose was grafted to the wild rose's root system, it's immediately below the canes and tends to be bulbous in shape.
Shaking the rose bush will force the soil mixture between the roots of the rose and thus eliminate any air pockets that might have formed, because these would have caused the roots to simply die off.
Placing a straight bamboo cane across the top of the hole allows us to gauge the height of the bush.
We press the soil down with the heel of our boot to firm the rose in and create a shallow trench around the plant.
We fill this trench with water and allow it to seep through to the roots.
We do this a couple of times and then, with a rake, level the area around the rose.
As we've decided to have the final height of the bud union about 1 inch above ground level, with the garden rake, we bury the rose bush slightly deeper to allow for the final settlement of the soil.
At this time of year there's no need for us to prune the rose back at all as the longer canes will protect the buds from any frosts.
Give the rose a good drink and simply keep an eye on it over the coming winter.
Should we have a frost, check the rose isn't being lifted out of the ground, simply by firming it down with our heel again.
Having spoken to your local rose grower and accepted her advice suggesting which particular types of roses will suit your neighborhood and climate, you've made your choices and arrived home with your new rose bushes ready to plant.
As it's Fall, and you had the option of buying either bare-rooted roses or container grown ones, you opted for the bare-rooted roses, because you had more choice and they were marginally cheaper.
You've already selected your site and confirmed that it receives a minimum of 6 hours direct sunlight a day, and the pH balance is ideal for roses because it's between 6.
0 and 6.
9.
Now you're ready to plant them.
The sooner they're in the ground the better.
It's never a good idea to have them hanging around too long once you've brought them home.
We have the bare-rooted roses standing in a bucket of water for a couple of hours before planting just to make sure they don't dehydrate.
Had the weather been unsuitable for planting them right away, you could always have heeled them in until conditions were more favourable.
Heeling in simply means digging a shallow trench, one side of which slopes steeply backwards and then laying your roses in the trench and backfilling it, making sure that the roots and half of the canes are covered well with soil.
This is one way of delaying planting if conditions are too cold and the ground frozen.
Roses are greedy feeders, so despite the soil being naturally a good quality loam, we've still decided to dig in plenty of well rotted manure (cow is best) and plenty of well rotted garden compost too.
These are spread over the area where the roses are to be planted and then dug in well with a garden fork.
As the conditions are ideal we start by digging our hole.
For a normal, field grown, 2 year old rose, the hole really needs to be about 24 inches square and 20 inches deep.
Digging a hole this large makes sure we have adequate room to spread the roots out fully, and the compost immediately beneath the rose is well fed too.
To encourage vigorous rooting, we throw a handful of bone-meal into the soil that we removed from the hole and mix it through well.
Now we move some of the manure/compost/soil mixture back into the hole to a depth of about 12 inches, and form a small pyramid on which we place the rose bush.
We spread the roots as much as we can, and start backfilling.
As we live in one of the milder districts we'll be keeping the bud union of the rose about 1 inch above the soil.
The bud union is where the bud from the cultivated rose was grafted to the wild rose's root system, it's immediately below the canes and tends to be bulbous in shape.
Shaking the rose bush will force the soil mixture between the roots of the rose and thus eliminate any air pockets that might have formed, because these would have caused the roots to simply die off.
Placing a straight bamboo cane across the top of the hole allows us to gauge the height of the bush.
We press the soil down with the heel of our boot to firm the rose in and create a shallow trench around the plant.
We fill this trench with water and allow it to seep through to the roots.
We do this a couple of times and then, with a rake, level the area around the rose.
As we've decided to have the final height of the bud union about 1 inch above ground level, with the garden rake, we bury the rose bush slightly deeper to allow for the final settlement of the soil.
At this time of year there's no need for us to prune the rose back at all as the longer canes will protect the buds from any frosts.
Give the rose a good drink and simply keep an eye on it over the coming winter.
Should we have a frost, check the rose isn't being lifted out of the ground, simply by firming it down with our heel again.
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