Feeding Roses for Blooms and Health

The subject of feeding roses is a controversial as the growing of the plants themselves with every grower and their uncle having a special system and every one of them describing the other’s systems as … well, you get the message. There’s little agreement in the world of roses when it comes to many cultivation techniques.

Right or wrong, here’s how I pursue the feeding of my roses so I have lots of blooms but I encourage the health of the plant itself so I don’t see much disease.

Feeding roses is traditionally done with a chemical fertilizer in the spring to “wake them up” and then and then fed again when they start to bloom. Late summer or fall feeding is not recommended as the new shoots developed by this feeding are prone to winter damage.

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I only feed compost and compost tea to my roses. (although I fudge that a bit with container grown plants and use fish emulsion as well for the extra nitrogen boost.) The trick in my mind is to have healthy plants that grow well, produce numerous buds and have the energy to open these up into fragrant blossoms without being eaten alive by disease.

Compost does that nicely. Compost promotes healthy root zones and beneficial bacteria and fungal growth at the root zone. It is these beneficial bacteria and fungi that destroy overwintering bacterial and fungal spores of other rose diseases. Compost tea when applied heavily to the plant (see below) is major fighter of leaf and bud disease.

Adding two to three shovels full of compost around the base of each rose plant in the spring is all the spring feeding my roses get.

When they start to bloom, I definitely want as many beneficial bacteria and fungi as I can get onto the leaves to fight off infection so I spray the plants (or pour over the plant using a watering can) enough compost tea to fully wet all the leaves. This seems to work quite nicely as the last five years I haven’t had to spray my roses for black spot or mildew.

Container grown roses are another story because watering regularly flushed nutrients out of the pot. In this case, I apply fish-emulsion weekly to feed the heavily growing roses. I like the fish emulsion because it is high enough in nitrogen that it quickly replaces the nitrogen that is washed away with watering. Nitrogen is water-soluble so as you water, you drive available plant food nitrogen down and out of the pot – which is why you have to replace it regularly if you want your plant to continue growing.

Traditionally planted roses (bud unions planted two inches deep and canes hilled) should not be fed after the end of July. This allows the wood to harden off before winter and will increase winter hardiness in colder gardens.

Northern planting (bud unions planted six inches deep and canes removed to the ground) can be fed weekly right up until hard frost to promote flower growth and root strength. As the canes will be removed anyway, there’s no need to worry about how hardy they are.

And that’s my system for feeding roses. It works for me and for others who have tried it; producing healthy rose plants with abundant blooms in an environmentally sound manner.

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