Heavenly June, the rose month is upon us! We have been treated to June a month early this year, and all the rose gardens seem to be a month ahead of themselves. In a normal year here in north central Connecticut, our first blooms would just be opening, but today, June 1st, I spent the day in the garden performing the first big deadheading of the year!

June Deadheading

Deadheading is a necessary summertime chore in the rose garden. We think roses were put on this earth to bring beauty and fragrance into our lives. Conversely, roses think they were planted here to propagate themselves. In most cases, if we want them to keep blooming all summer, we need to remove the spent blooms which will stimulate our roses to bloom again and again. I always try to prune to an outward facing petiole (leaflet).

Some rosarians will always prune to a five leaf petiole. However, with some roses that would mean pruning away most of the cane! I will prune to a three leaf, outward facing petiole as long as the cane is big enough in diameter to support a new, good-sized rose cane. Inside that leaflet is a tiny bud, and that bud points in the direction the next cane will grow.

The reason we try not to prune to an inward facing bud is that the new cane will grow toward the center of the plant, cutting down air circulation and raising the possibility that two canes will cross and the plant will get injured from the rose prickles when the wind blows. After I have pruned off my spent rose at a 45 degree angle 1/4″ above the outward facing petiole, I always seal up the wound with some regular old Elmer’s Glue. It dries clear and hard, so that cane borers can’t drill holes in our rose canes.

Cleanup

Put your deadheads in a bucket, and then dump them in the trash. You don’t want to compost rose garbage just in case there might be disease spores in there. If I’m going to a wedding, I’ll pull all the petals off before I deadhead the plants and keep them in a plastic bag in the fridge till I go to the ceremony. They are just lovely, and they don’t sting like rice!

Floribundas can grow pretty tall if you just deadhead the spent blooms instead of any cane length. Deadheading shrub roses is the same. Deadheading will help to keep your garden clean and you will be amazed at how quickly your roses will regrow and rebloom!

This early year has caused some problems with unwelcome visitors in the garden. I went to Woodland Gardens in Manchester, CT on Saturday to do a summer care of roses one-on-one chat with my old customers (I was their rosarian for five years), and most people had the same problem. At least 20 people brought plastic bags with rose foliage in it, and it looked just like the picture at the top of this blog. That picture was emailed to me from a friend who wondered what happened to his roses. This is a beautiful sample of rose slug damage.

Pests

Rose slug, we mentioned in the last article, is not a slug at all, but a maggot (larva) of a type of sawfly. The deposited eggs on the backs of the leaves hatch quickly into these larvae and eat the leaves from the undersides. Usually, they don’t eat all the way through, so the top layer of the leaf looks like it has windowpanes in it. Rose slug, unchecked, can do a lot of damage. They are very tiny and hard to see, but they sure can mess up your leaves! Severe infestations can keep the plant from photosynthesizing properly. I don’t mind using insecticides, but if you are an organic gardener, you can try spraying on insecticidal soap or neem oil. Just make sure you hit the undersides of the leaves where the critters are hiding.

This spring has been very dry here in Connecticut. Remember always that the most important thing during the rose growing season is WATER-WATER-WATER!!! Water is cheap fertilizer, and roses are thirsty plants! If you want really excellent roses, make sure your babies get 3-5 gallons of water a week. If you use a time released fertilizer like Osmocote, every time you water, your roses will be fed. For us in my part of the country, the four month variety is the product of choice.

Enjoy these lovely, fragrant days! Smile back at your beauties! Welcome to June, the high, holy days of roses!