Rose Care In October

Hi again, it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and today I'm launching a new series of videos for this channel called Rose Care Month by Month. This first one being Rose Care in October and I've always thought this would be a great series to do but what's been hanging me up is the question of regional variation. That is that unless you're in the Pacific Northwest climate like me, a mild coastal northern temperate climate, then the timings of these activities will vary for you and for instance when it comes to winter protection you may have to do a way more careful job of it or you may not have to do it at all. So my approach to that and my fix to that is that I'm going to be talking in these videos on the question of why I'm doing these things in the timing I'm doing it so that you can take it and apply it back to your own climate or region. The way I hope you can navigate this series is I'll be breaking it up into six different subtopics for each video. The first one is main activities. The main thing I'll be hands-on doing with my roses that month. The second one is fertilizer and soil care. The third one is any watering considerations for that month. The fourth one, not surprising based on my channel here, is propagation. The fifth one will be pests and disease that you have to be concerned about in that month and then the final one will be a plant spotlight. Let's start then with main activities and it does seem funny that my first action list item is a non-action. I am chilling with my roses and enjoying the last of their perfectly formed blooms of the season. After this, it's all downhill for the blooms. Now why am I saying do nothing at this point? I don't know if you can catch between the trees behind me there that the blueberries have started to turn red. They're preparing for the winter and unfortunately roses owing to their sort of South Asian ancestry or that portion of their ancestry oftentimes will continue to grow as long as there's sunlight like this. As long as there's warm enough temperatures, they're going to continue to put up soft fresh new growth and try to flower all the way through into the cold season which is not exactly good for them. Last year we got zapped by a deep cold after some warm weather and it really decimated a lot of local roses. So what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to encourage them to slow down and shut down on their own. I stopped feeding the roses in August. I stopped all major pruning in August. I even stopped deadheading the flowers in September and now I'm just trying to hope to let them settle down for the season and that's what you're going to see on a lot of the roses in the field here. I'll get you some close-ups as well. They're starting to form hips the berries or fruit of the rose where they're trying to develop seeds and ripen and harden off their stems. That's exactly what we want them to do at least for landscape roses. Now the other activity that will be on my list here for October and it remains on the list from September but I didn't do a September video is that it's a good time to transplant roses or plant new roses at least in this climate here. There's still a reasonable amount of time for those roots to develop and get established in the garden before we hit deep cold temperatures. Explaining my climate a little bit we do expect to have some deep below freezing temperatures but we don't usually get that here until say mid-December or the deepest cold usually in January. So this time between early October and all the way through November usually we have reasonable temperatures for root development of the roses so transplanting at this time is not a bad idea. No major pruning well what about roses like this one here and others that have continued to throw these long unsupportable stems that are just going to break off in the winter wind or snow load. The answer to that is wait at least in our climate it's still a wait. Remember that any kind of pruning that I do now any kind of feeding that I do now is going to encourage fresh new growth and the roses definitely have not stopped with fresh growth at this point. So what I'd like to do is let it run out of fuel let it run out of time get some cold weather before I attempt pruning back these long stems that would otherwise break over the winter so it may be an activity for November or in December in our climate after we've had a little bit more cold and the roses have settled down a bit. The next section of this video is feeding and soil care and I mentioned already that I cut off the roses in the landscape hard stop in August and you know that actually feeding with a decent amount of nitrogen can really spur on soft growth in roses so that's what I'm trying to avoid on the landscape. Now inside here with my roses in pots I'm going to give you a slight exception to this rule which is to say that if you intend to overwinter them in a protected place like I do my goals are different. I'm trying to keep these in decent growth and I'm trying to keep them well fed going over the winter and into the spring season. It is less than it is at the peak of the season but I haven't cut them off completely because I don't want them to run out of fertilizer in the pot and have to try to catch that up early in the next season. Now if you have landscape pots that are going to spend the winter outdoors or just tucked inside the garage and you are going to let them go fully dormant I would treat them like landscape plants and cut them off of fertilizer but if you have some protection or you're keeping them in active growth that would be the exception to the rule. The mulch I'm going to leave on the plants out there until I do my spring pruning or late winter pruning that's when I attend to the mulch replacement so that's the other part of soil care I'll be discussing. The thing to acknowledge about watering in October is that my needs have gone way down. Look behind me here you'll see that the grass has recovered from a light beige color in July and August it's now a deep green meaning there's lots of soil moisture out here and I probably don't have to worry about my landscape plants at all unless we had some wicked dry stretch and even then we might be okay but plants in containers you can't count on that same thing you still have to stay on your watering schedule but you should acknowledge that that the day length has dropped. Our peak day length in the middle of summer goes to about 16 hours of sunlight and now it's down below 12 so it's definitely far less light and far less demand to do with the temperature and the sunlight and it's heading towards eight so it's on its way downwards doesn't mean you can neglect it entirely but you are trying to manage your watering in the containers on the low end On to the topic of rose propagation you can see that this is my downstairs propagation room my favorite method semi-hardwood cuttings and this table would normally be full during the growing season in fact double stacked in some cases and now it's down to about half a table I have really limited down my semi-hardwood propagation for now knowing that if I do take cuttings today I'm going to have to overwinter them in this room the whole time there's no longer enough time to get them well rooted and out into the greenhouse to overwinter out in sort of semi-protected conditions well just because I have to slow my roll on semi-hardwood cuttings doesn't mean I have to stop propagation altogether this is a variety called prairie peace and what you see down here because this plant is on its own roots and I know that is an own root sucker which all I would have to do is dig that out of the ground and put it into a pot and I'll get a new plant of this which can be a highly successful and rewarding form of propagation especially on a variety like this one that does not propagate well from cutting so this is the time to turn your attention to pulling those own root suckers out of the garden the second thing you can do is collect seeds seeds from your mature especially species roses like rugosa out in the landscape and begin the stratification process I'll link a video in the top right hand corner to describe that process if you look closely at the growing tip of this rose you're going to see a resurgence of that quintessential spring pest the aphids and then of course the ladybug right there hunting on them this is nothing to be alarmed about we do see more soil moisture and favorable temperatures in the fall that brings the aphids back I still also see everything else out in the garden but a comforting thought is that we're into the winter season where everything is going to go dormant and the populations of all these pests will take a blow at that time I will be doing some overwinter spraying to try to knock down the overwintering insects and diseases things like black spot and powdery mildew so stay tuned for that but it's not quite time yet and finally for plant highlights I'm going to throw in pompanella it's the very same rose I started the video with and it is sort of the quintessential rose that blooms in the middle of summer and then blooms one more big flush going into September October and that's what we're seeing the tail end of here but it just looks gorgeous this is the fully open stage of the rose kind of looks like lollipops at a lollipop stand really quite nice and I can see why this has held its appeal all right that brings to a conclusion what I would consider a pretty good discussion of rose care tasks and considerations for my pacific northwest climate in October what I'm really hoping from this series is that I get a lot of comments below the video from people who do not share my region from people elsewhere who can say hey I'm in the Midwest this is my state and this is what I'm doing based on what's happening in my climate or from Australia or Indonesia wherever you are if you share that in the comments you'll be helping those people who my situation doesn't specifically apply to by highlighting those differences I hope you enjoyed it if you have any questions please leave them below in the comments I'll see what I can do to help