"Does "no spray" really mean NO SPRAY, or just no chemical sprays?"

It certainly can mean precisely that.
Without going into the downside of the chemicals you're considering, I'll tell you that the whole thing rests on smart selection of roses.

If you are in Northern CA, there will be many roses that will be disease-free for you, with no spray other than the occasional garden hose wash. The key is to remove from your garden those roses that will not

I'm not sure where you are located, but next Saturday is the Open Garden and Rose Sale at the Historic Rose Garden in the old Sacramento City Cemetery. (1000 Broadway, Sacramento). This is a great opportunity to experience a world-class rose garden, which is not sprayed.

For details, see the flyer and catalog at the link shown. Or ask me for more information.

Jeri

Here is a link that might be useful: For Open Garden Info

When I say "no spray" I mean no fungicides at all.

Listen to Jeri, and find others in your area. Why do you think that you will need a fungicide?

Here, I pretty much know what roses will require a regular treatment, and which will not, and I know from the first year. The treatment starts right after pruning.

Without taking sides on the spray or no spray issue, I'd argue for a wait and see approach. For one thing, I would think if you're going to have real BS problems, you'd have seen them already, in the first year. For a second thing, it used to be the gospel that fungicides could not cure BS, so one had to take a preventative approach to spraying. It is now known that some BS sprays are curative in the sense that they kill the fungus in an established BS infection. The Baeyer tebuconazole fungicide is one such spray and this suggests that no great harm will result if your wait and see approach gives disappointing results.

You are in Northern California. There is some disease pressure there, mostly in the rainy season of late fall, winter, and early spring.

You are not in Alabama, Illinois, Florida, Maryland...places with horrific Black Spot potential, potential so severe it can kill a rose by forcing it to refoliate and refoliate and refoliate (plus roses must endure a severe winter that weaken them also).

If you are reading about spraying, remember you are not in an area with disease pressure so significant it will kill your roses. Books that talk about "preventative spraying" are mostly for east of the Rockies. The big killer disease, Black Spot, loves warm humidity. In California, when it is humid it is cool. When it is warm, it is dry. Hence Black Spot is somewhat rare. We still get it, just not to the point where it is fatal.

My experience with preventative spraying: it can be really effective if done once or twice in spring right after leaf out, and once or twice right after Labor Day when the nights start cooling off. Just once or twice a year and you can get 90% of the benefits.

After a while you learn your garden and your roses and can work around disease, by doing things like pruning later when the winter is particularly rainy, eliminating the worst Rusters, etc. We in CA have that luxury. No wonder it is so expensive to live here. ;^)

No spray, as I practice it, means I'll get some disease but I live with it. I've even got a few roses that loose most of their leaves every year but,again I live with it. Disease resistant means the rose will get some disease when disease pressure is high.
Fo my part, I choose to ignore diease and insect damage.
Most of my roses are hardy disease resistant shrub varieties..

I agree with hoovb. If I lived in California, I wouldn't spray at all. I have some roses that never bloomed before I started spraying regularly. I only do it 'preventively' because I know that barring a miracle, I will have blackspot badly and it will defoliate at least half of my roses completely. Even this year, I didn't spray until last week and I have it on about 1/3 of my roses already.

If you haven't had it yet, I'd wait it out and see what happens. Most people in California don't have issues with blackspot. And I have to say that the sprays don't do a lot for PM, I still get it but it doesn't really hurt the roses.

I don't spray any fungicide on the majority of my roses. Of those I do spray, I mostly go organic, and I do wait until they start needing it. I might spray them once with Bayer and then use a sulfur/milk/seaweed spray the rest of the summer, for instance. It works well, I think. I ignore a bit of BS, too. Why not?

But on little roses in bad weather, I use chemicals. I've lost too many little roses to watch that creeping death thing and not jump. Huh-uh :)