The shorter days and cooler temperatures are signaling the roses to start to go dormant for their winter rest. It’s time to protect roses in your garden.

For me, the signals are saying it’s time to start up the shredder. Then, as the leaves fall, I can rake and shred them to make one of the key ingredients of my compost chopped leaves. I’ll stockpile the leaves until spring and summer. Then, I’ll mix them with the grass clippings from the lawn to make that wonderful brown gold that is great for all plants.

Protecting Roses from a Cold Winter

In the rose garden, I’m pulling out stray weeds, picking up leaves and petals, and checking out which roses did well and which did not.

The usual time to do actual winter protection is Thanksgiving weekend. Since it’s later this year, I’ll be doing my roses the weekend before. By then we’ll have had a few good frosts and the ground should be hard, but not frozen. Hopefully, the little mice, voles’ and chipmunks will then have found their winter beds far from the garden.

Mounding soil for roses

The most common winter protection technique is to hill up soil around the base of the plants. To do this, bring soil from another garden such as an annual or vegetable garden. Dont scrape up soil from around the bush as this will expose the roots to the winter temperatures. Soil should be mounded up about 10-12 inches. To help keep the soil in place, you can use rings made of roofing paper or several layers of newspaper placed around the base and stapled together.

If you don’t have soil, use loose compost or bark mulch. Here in Connecticut we often get heavy rains in mid- to late-winter that tend to wash down the soil mounds. To help protect the soil, after the ground is very frozen, such as after Christmas, place evergreen boughs over the soil mounds to help deflect the rain. A good source of boughs is discarded Christmas trees.

Before mounding soil, it is a good idea to strip the leaves from the bushes. This helps get disease and insects out of the garden and makes clean up next spring easier. If the bushes are very large and may rock in the winter wind, they should be tied to a stake or cut back to about two or three feet.

Thats the basics of protecting bush roses. If you didnt get to take soil samples in October, now is a good time to do that before piling on the soil.

Climbers and miniature roses

Taking care of climbers involves hilling up soil around the base and tying the canes together on a trellis or other support. It would be good to wrap the canes with burlap or porous mulch cloth for extra protection from the wind. Dont use any film-like material or you will cook your roses.

Miniature roses are easily protected by raking only oak leaves around them. Oak leaves break down less over the winter than other leaves. They can be held in place by a fence made of poultry netting or perhaps porous mulch cloth and 1 x 2 stakes. Trim the minis back to about a foot fill the enclosure with the leaves and youre done.

Now you sit back and rest from gardening. Soon the catalogs will be arriving and plans can be made for next year.