Delicate and fragrant roses delight the eye during the hot season of the year. Moreover, sometimes flowering repeats 2-3 times over the summer. If you properly prepare flowers for winter, they will bloom profusely in the new season. Autumn work does not always go smoothly due to mistakes made by gardeners. You need to remember about them and try to prevent them.
Inexperienced gardeners believe that it is better to do the work in advance. But this misconception will negatively affect flowering in the new season. Roses are frost-resistant plants. And they begin to prepare for winter when the first cold days arrive with temperatures below 0 °C.
Before sheltering for the winter, the bushes are pruned to a height of 20–30 cm.
In fact, without knowledge of garden groups, you should not rush to cover. Not every rose is heavily pruned for the winter. This is allowed for representatives of hybrid tea and floribunda roses. Ground cover, bush and climbing plants cannot be pruned this way. Otherwise, the recovery will be delayed next year. And the flowering will be weak or end before it even begins.
Without knowing the group, it is better not to prune, but to bend the branches to the ground, removing the buds and trimming the leaves in advance.
Autumn fertilizing with only potassium and phosphorus
Misconception of gardeners. In fact, for the growth of immunity, the bushes need complex feeding, which contains calcium and macroelements.
Potassium sulfate, potassium magnesia, potassium chloride or sulfate are used as potassium supplements.
Both types of superphosphate are suitable for feeding phosphorus. Chalk, wood ash, and dolomite flour are rich in calcium. For autumn feeding, it is not allowed to use nitrogen-containing fertilizers, which will cause crop growth. Roses will give up their last energy and enter the winter frosts without strength. This threatens flowering, and in some cases leads to bush death.
Only spruce branches are used to cover roses
In fact, there are other covering materials, and they are no worse, and maybe even better than spruce branches. Moreover, it is difficult to get spruce branches in sufficient quantities, because the forest will suffer. If you can get this material, it is placed on top of the frame. Other covering materials are roofing felt, parchment with a film on top of it.
Watering and loosening are necessary to survive the winter
This is actually true. Agricultural practices give plants the strength to survive the winter season. But this does not apply to roses. The bushes are watered in the summer, and stopped in September. Plants are preparing for hibernation. If watering continues, the growing season will continue, the bushes will lose a lot of strength and will not overwinter well.
Loosening activates growth and prevents it from going into a dormant state. At the end of August, loosening stops.
Each rose is spudded before winter
In fact, roses rarely need such a procedure. For example, in the middle zone only roses propagated by cuttings are planted. Or when a rose grafted onto a rose hip is shallowly buried, and the wound from the graft lies above the surface of the ground. If the depth is more than 5 cm, hilling is even harmful.The base of the bush will support itself during the thaw, but if there is frost, the bark on the plants will crack.
Other isolated autumn mistakes of novice gardeners are also possible. But if you take into account and avoid at least these five mistakes, roses will survive the winter and return in the spring with renewed vigor. And in the new season they will bring pleasure with beauty and extraordinary aroma.
