Residual fertilizers, I'd bet, along with the warm weather. I always seem to find basals at the beginning of the year, right as I'm pruning.

Is your forsythia blooming yet? I gotta know if spring is making its way up the coast!!! ;-))

Congratulations!

So glad you posted this, Buford, We're supposed to go down to 29, and I just noticed before dinner a new 6' basal cane on my big baby Don Juan. His other new cane is 6' tall. So I went out just now and piled compost on it.

Hopefully, they'll all (yours and mine and everybody's) make it through the night.

Sherry

Diane, it's still very much winter here. After we had one warm day, it's been cold and windy.

Carla

It's been warm here, and the roses have new growth, but last night it briefly dipped down all the way to 27F (the colder, northern-most suburbs of Dallas). It was not below freezing long enough to cause any damage to the new growth ... all the roses look great today. I have many perennials with new growth too, and they all look fine today as well.

Randy

Diane, I saw some forsythia blooming last weekend. And my Okame cherry trees are blooming.

Carla, I doomed us. I was out on the deck the other evening saying spring is here. Then WHAM we had that storm yesterday and now this cold. There were snow flurries this morning.

This is way too late to do anything for tonight, and my roses are in deeper winter than most of yours mentioned above.
What I do is toss weeded out (but still green and lush) chickweed around the basals. What I want is for lots of water retaining greenery to surround the basals. (This has saved a lot of basals in other years.) (Once they get six feet high, they are definitely on their own.) (And the thunderstorms we've been having this spring can have given them the N boost to get them started.)
If on a six footer, there's a look of wilt, of puckered stem, that part needs to be cut off so it doesn't become a site for botrytis to get established.

The temps dipped down to 30 degrees last night out here and I had a brand new bare root just planted with at least 7 or 8 new basals. I had some of those plastic laundry baskets from the dollar store so I put one over it and then put a sheet on top of that. Then I forgot to turn the darn sprinkler system off. The grass iced a bit and the sheet was wet but at least the rose was fine. The new leaves it had are still looking great so I still have high hopes. And it was 94 degrees a week ago...

Will the roses in my pot ghetto on the porch be ok??

dang....24* tonight

dang.

I don't mind losing new growth on the established canes. I did prune some bushes, but left a lot of canes and new growth just incase.

But getting 4 new basals on an fairly old climber was surprising. Maybe all the organics I used last year finally kicked in!

It's already down to 26.4.

I think mine are still in partial winter mode, they better know live or go silently. Buford, you are funny.

Carla

UGH, it's 21 degrees. I don't want to go outside and look.......

Ouch, that's definitely a "hard" freeze.

Randy

16 degrees here this morning when I got up. That is WAY colder than they predicted. All the roses were leafing out...I hate to look outside too.

Carol

It was 30 yesterday morning and all the new leaves look fine. Out digging around this morning and found basal breaks from where a rose had disappeared. Maybe I will find more comming up from the roots. It was covered with leaves mostly but it looked fine.

I peeked out....my strawberries that are sitting under the edge of the front porch had frost all over their curled leaves......that was enough for me.....I didn't go out any farther.

OK, I just went out. The roses look ok. And the basals are still ok, at least they look ok. Even though the shredded leaves I put on them must have been moist and the got a little frozen.

The only thing that was damaged were any open blossms on the cherry trees and some new growth on the hydrangeas.

23 here for both of the last two days. Carol, that is NOT the temp the Thermal Belt should be enjoying.
I think we'll both be out knocking off crispy leaves/leaflets.
This is so not amusing.

The only one of my roses that was showing any growth of note was Climbing Cecile Brunner (vigorous, it can't wait to grow again). We had a spat of warmish days, the bud eyes put out about a quarter inch of new growth, then got smacked down by winter. I think this weekend we might have a low above freezing. All the other roses are still fast asleep.

Let's get all this coldness out of the way, so we can have a proper Spring with no worries.

Eric

Ann, you are right. The past two years have seen weather here that is totally abnormal both winter and summer. I have been afraid to prune my roses. Not that it made much difference, they leafed out top to bottom anyway and I'm sure those leaves are toast. I'm with Eric, lets get all of this out of the way now so we won't have a repeat of that late April freeze last year. My roses haven't fully recovered from that stress and damage.

Carol

I don't know if you all saw the pruning tips on the last Ashdown newsletter. They suggested leaving more old canes on the bush due to last years freeze and drought.

On the bushes I did prune, I didn't remove a lot of canes down to the graft, even on HTs. I figure I can always go back and take them out later if I do get some new basals this spring. Last year, between the freeze and drought, I didn't get that many.