Miraculous, beautiful warm weather comes to the rose garden, and with it amazing growth! Once the temperature is 50 or over at night, they grow all night, too. If I am home, every day I need to go out to the gardens every few hours, because I don’t want to miss anything! I call this “inspecting the troops.” Almost fifteen years ago, CT Rose Society printed up bumper stickers that said, “I Break for Roses.” Everyone was up in arms, because technically it was supposed to say ‘brake,’ but I loved it just the way it was, because that is exactly what I do! I break for roses!

Breaking for roses gives you the skinny on how your roses are feeling. By now, we’ve fertilized for the first time, and I have sprayed three times already. This has been the most unusual, early spring I have ever seen. We may think it’s the middle of May, but here in Connecticut, by the growth we have and the condition of the flora all around us, Mother Nature thinks it is the middle of June! Gardeners by nature need to be nurturing and flexible, so this spring, I jumped in with both feet! I saw little green caterpillars hanging on their silken threads from the oak trees in the middle of April. They have a voracious appetite, and they love roses.

Pests: Rose Slugs and Aphids!

Rose Slug, which is not a slug at all, but a tiny sawfly maggot, feeds on the reverse side of the foliage and leaves tiny windowpanes in the leaves. Aphids normally don’t show up in my area until May 17 at 2:30 in the afternoon (ha ha!), but this year they showed up a month early, too. As gardeners, we all have choices in our treatment of garden pests. Some people prefer to hand-pick the little varmints and drown them in soapy water. I know some folks who squish aphids between their fingers. That certainly leaves lovely green goosh behind! I find it easier to add some systemic insecticide to my spray material which lasts within the foliage for ten days to two weeks, and protects against insect attack.

I try to keep on a ten day schedule spraying fungicide. If you don’t mind spraying, your foliage will be just beautiful. Once black spot sets into your garden, the damage will be there all season, but with the new systemic fungicides it is possible to get through the whole growing season with clean leaves.

Watering

Just be sure to water well the day before you spray or fertilize. Well hydrated roots and foliage withstand spraying and feeding very well. Heat or wind-stressed foliage can show spray burn, and the tiny, little white feeder roots in the soil can be burned by fertilizer if they haven’t had enough water. I think the most important thing you can do for your roses once they are really off and running is to water-water-water! We have had a lot of drying wind this spring, and new, succulent growth is really susceptible to wind dessication. Just pull out your watering wand, whistle a happy tune, and give your beauties a few welcome gallons of water. They will be glad you did, and so will you when they reward you with armloads of bloom!

For the last few years, the roses in my gardens seem to be blooming earlier and earlier. I used to tell folks that asked that my early roses would start blooming the first week of June. The last five years, I have had roses in May. This year, my first rose bloomed on May 4th, the earliest ever! As of this morning, there are blooms on Clair Matin, Outta the Blue, Constellation, Daydream, and Sally Holmes. The others will not be far behind, but I think it’ll be a couple of weeks or so for the hybrid teas, grandifloras, and floribundas. They will still be very early, and whoops! The CT Rose Society Rose Show isn’t scheduled until June 20th! It looks like most of us will be regrowing our second flush by then! I wonder how the judges would feel about grocery store roses?

Find some time each day to spend in your rose garden. They truly will speak to you! I think you’ll find that soon you, too, will need a bumpersticker which reads, “I Break For Roses!”