melissa_thefarm on the Antique Rose Forum doesn't irrigate throughout the long, dry Mediterranean summer.

Michaelg, tried to find the melissa, and the ones that came up for me did not say anything about the irrigating thing. What am I missing? There are lots of posts but seemed to pertain to other things. Any hints? Thanks - Barb

michaelg - found it in another search but not just melissa. That is not the post I was referring to. Did you ever post on this subject? It was rather lengthy but very good. Barb

Barb,
Here I am. I went and looked too, and didn't find posts I wrote centered around drought and how to deal with it. It's such an ongoing consideration here that it permeates my thinking, and evidently I haven't made it a topic in itself for a long time.
Would you like me to write a little about my experiences of gardening with no summer water? Let me know, and what kinds of things you're interested in. A caveat is that we have very different summer conditions--you're in Indiana, right?
It's raining here, thank God. After a year of weird weather, and months of unseasonal drought, we're finally seeing normal spring temperatures and normal spring rain. It is so wonderful; and I hope you'll soon see the same.
Melissa

Melissa, it would certainly be nice if you could give me a little insight of how you deal with periods of drought. I understand if you limit your watering, it will encourage the roots of the roses to grow deeper rather than more shallow, plus thicker mulch, etc. Won't have too much time alloted, so can't go into it too deeply. How nice of you to volunteer your help. I appreciate your kindness immensely. I am running short on time to get this together. Thanks again, and God Bless. Barb

Barb,
I'll try and state my practices briefly, along with the thinking about them and a description of the conditions in which I garden. Use whatever of it you want, and feel free to quote if that's useful.

I live in Italy, in the northern foothills of the Apennines. I have a large garden with a current population of probably 500-600 roses, along with many other plants. Mine is not a rose garden but a garden with a lot of roses. The garden is on steeply sloping ground with a southern exposure, most of it open to sun and wind, a part of it in part shade. The soil is a heavy gray clay, probably neutral to somewhat alkaline, and adding organic matter to it one of my major concerns. The climate I would describe as on the cusp between Mediterranean and continental. We have long, usually wet, chilly but not very cold winters, and hot dry summers with low humidity and fresher temperatures at night. Every year we have two to four months with little to no rain. My roses are mostly old or older varieties: once-blooming old roses (Gallicas, Albas, Damasks, Centifolias, Mosses), warm-climate old roses (Teas, Chinas, and Noisettes), and other old classes, plus Hybrid Musks and an assortment of shrub roses, species roses, ramblers and climbers.
We have no well and public water supplies can run low in the summer, so from the beginning I knew that I would have to be sparing in my water use. I already had some experience with dry summers from gardening in western Washington state, and I knew that roses can easily live through many weeks without rain or watering, though they stop flowering after a while. So I planned on growing roses without summer water after the first year in the ground.
We buy roses bareroot, grafted or own root, or I propagate them from cuttings or am given plants that gardening friends have propagated. I plant almost everything in fall, after the rains have started and the weather has cooled off, usually in October, and try to finish by Christmas. This way the roses have time through winter and spring to grow roots before the summer drought sets in, generally late May to June. I have to admit we are scanty in our site preparation. We add some compost and perhaps some sand, mixing it in with our pottery-quality clay, then mulch afterwards, not touching the stem of the rose, with hay. Lately I've been doing mini-terracing around the rose planting site, leveling the area so as to catch rain that falls in dry seasons, but encouraging drainage during extremely wet periods by adding more hay and compost to the ground and creating a steeper drop below the rose. The terraced ground looks like steps rather than an even slope. About the worst way to plant a rose (or anything else) is to dig a hole in the ground and fill it with a completely different kind of dirt. It's like growing a rose in a pot, with all the difficulties that entails.
We water our roses the first year they're in the ground. We use a hose, which is uncomfortable enough that we don't do it unless it's necessary. If the ground seems moist under the surface--I stick a finger in to check--I don't water. If the plant looks reasonably happy, I don't worry about it.
We keep a permanent hay mulch on our beds. We use hay, usually old or spoiled, because it's locally available, cheap, and nutritious, though of course it sprouts grass by the millions. I've recently realized that for years I've been making the mistake of applying it too thickly, so that rain and other water can't get through and the ground beneath actually stays dry. The mulch should be permeable. It should be organic, so that it breaks down and enriches the soil. Mulch can be a lot of different materials, depending on what's available locally: grass clippings spread thinly, chipped pruned branches from the garden. There's always something that doesn't come from a thousand miles away.
In the last few years I've gotten interested in organic mulches. These are just little plants that grow under the roses and in the beds, often annuals. They can be wild plants. The beds in my garden are full of volunteer annual geranium, spurge, vetches, violas--also annual grasses. I weed out ugly plants and leave attractive ones. Or the gardener can plant herbaceous perennials or annuals of his or her choice. The organic mulch keeps the ground cool and moist; when the plants die their growth gets recycled into the garden. In the case of annuals, the roots die as well as the top part of the plant, and remain as organic amendment in the soil with no digging on the part of the gardener. I haven't noticed a problem with water supplies in my garden: the roses are deep rooted and the annuals aren't, so they aren't grabbing water from each other. On an aesthetic level my preference is greatly for roses mixed with other plants; and I've heard it argued that mixed plantings are healthier than monocultures.
There are gardeners who argue that leaving the soil undisturbed after the initial preparation and planting allows a web of soil microlife do develop that's highly beneficial to the garden. I think this idea has merit, and lately I've been avoiding disturbing the soil, just adding mulch and pulling or digging only the worst weeds. I began doing this after I noticed that in a couple of places where I had planted roses and just left them, the roses were doing quite well, better than in some places where I fussed over them. Undisturbed ground is also less welcoming to weeds.
I grow my roses lean, with a minimum of watering and with almost no fertilizer beyond the hay and living mulch. The clay is basically fertile. They grow more slowly than roses that get regular abundant nutrients. But I think this way the roots develop in balance with the top growth, and are capable of supporting the rose even in dry periods. With longer intervals between watering and more water when it does come, the roses root deeply.
I can grow roses this way because the garden has deep moisture retentive soil and because I grow mostly thrifty varieties of roses. I grow roses mainly for garden effect rather than for cutting, and it doesn't bother me if they don't bloom during the summer if that's what the weather brings. I rarely lose a rose after the first year and I don't believe I've ever had a rose defoliate because of drought. Another thing to think of is protection from excessive sun and drying winds. Most roses don't love windy areas, and some hate it.

Okay, this isn't short. It's also not quite complete. Also it may not be what you're looking for, though I hope you can mine some ideas from it. The part I wanted to add but got too tired for is how to move roses from a regimen of frequent light watering to rare deep watering and otherwise prepare roses now in spring for a possible drought in summer.
I hope this is helpful. Let me know if you have questions about any of what I wrote.

Melissa

Melissa- I want to apologize for you having to take the time to answer my post when you were so tired. I can fully appreciate that because I have had the flu and am still weak and trying to work on this project. I am deeply interested into how you go toward weaning them off of the watering to prepare them for the drought. When and if you get the time, can you give me a little insight toward that because I am thinking that is what we are going to have to do. We are supposed to be getting storms this weekend, but usually by this time we have had an adequate amount of rain to help us in transition, but this year it has gone all around us in the state, but we have had very little. Our seasons are definitely changing. Thank you immensely for your help. My daughter lives in California in a very dry area, but she flies and doesn't have the time to garden like I do--although she has planted a couple of tomato plants in containers. I talked her into that, I admit. Anyway, if it is not possible for you to accommodate me in this, I will understand and truly appreciate what you have done. Barb

Barb,
Please withdraw that apology, it's not needed. I spent some time working on this because you said you didn't have much time, and after a while my brain began to fry; I imagine you're familiar with the phenomenon.
I entering into theory with what I write here because our roses have always been grown with little water, from watering I mean. Certainly when it rains nothing on earth could be wetter than our garden. From what I've heard from other gardeners here on the forum, roses that are watered regularly, and usually non very abundantly, root shallowly. Rose that are watered at longer intervals and receiving more water, root more deeply and extensively and so have a larger root system to find water with. My experience has been that, once soil dries out, it takes a lot of water to get it wet again: the quantity of water needed for deep watering of dry soil should not be underestimated. Again, a mulch to keep the soil cool and moist is important.
From my reading on the forum, I gather that there are two basic strategies for maintaining roses during drought. I believe michaelg, who first pointed you in my direction, has written about the other strategy. My method is well-spaced-out deep watering (when watering is needed at all) to insure deep rooting. The other method is to water more frequently but in small quantities, closely monitoring the roses to see if they're suffering--seeing signs of the leaves wilting, for example--and watering them only when they need it. The idea is to water the roses, but in the most efficient manner possible. Gardeners who adopt this strategy often use a drip irrigation system, which is the thriftiest way to water. Mulch is important for both strategies.
My method REQUIRES deep, water retentive soil. No amount of adaptive measures on the part of the gardener are going to work if the roses are growing in a foot of soil over granite or in thin sandy free-draining soil. Sherry in Florida is an example of a gardener with sandy soil; Ingrid in California has shallow soil over rock. As far as I can determine, they HAVE to water during drought. Most of our garden is clay, and it goes down several feet, as I know from landslides in the garden. Where I have planted roses in shallow ground, that's where they've died, but the roses in clay can take just about anything.
I haven't said anything about how much water is a lot of water or how long a long interval between waterings is. That's because I don't know. For the roses, even our babies, six-inch-tall roses planted in November, went through four weeks of rainless, unusually sunny warm weather in March and were perfectly happy; in fact, all the garden grew like mad in that May-like weather. Gardeners will have to see how matters stand in their own gardens. But if they want to prepare their roses for infrequent, or no watering this summer, I would suggest watering at two week intervals to start in periods of no rain, or even less frequently, say once a month, depending on the garden; but always observing their plants carefully. My impression is that gardeners tend to think that shrubs in general need more frequent watering than is actually the case. However, I'm most familiar with my Mediterranean-Continental garden, with its plants that are accustomed to dry summers.
There are measures that gardeners can take to create a garden environment in which roses require less water, but they can't be accomplished in the couple of months your gardeners will have before summer arrives. I'm talking about things like protecting roses from wind with barriers of walls, hedges, belts of trees. In any case, my problems are likely to different from those of gardeners in your area, as I have to deal with wind and too much sun, rather than cold, for example. A garden can be designed so that the basic needs of its plants are to a considerable extent supplied passively, but how to do that is going to depend on the individual garden.
All right, that's all that occurs to me at the moment. If I have more ideas I'll put them down as well. I have to get my daughter to school, so this is written without much editing and I may rethink some of what I just wrote.
Melissa

Melissa- Thank you, thank you for helping me. You were so eloquent in your reply and just what I had hoped for. It is so nice for you to take the time when you have a family to care for, etc. I'm a great-grandma, but I remember when I had the demands you have and I know how precious your time is--plus the fact I had a small son who had lost his Dad and I was trying to work and do all the things necessary to keep going. That's all in the past but just wanted you to know that I am indeed grateful for your help. - Barb

Barb,
You're welcome. I have time to spend on the garden and gardening forums, and my family know and respect that. I can do both.
I wanted to suggest that, if you have time, you might start a thread asking for others' ideas on how to prepare roses to better get them through a dry summer. I've never had to CHANGE my garden cultural practices to deal with drought, which is what you're basically asking about. Also my climate is very different from yours and there may be implications owing to that difference. You will probably get a lot of responses if you post threads both in the Antique Roses forum as well as in this forum, with the topic stated in the title. I've been happy to tell you my ideas on the subject, but my experience is limited, and I think it would be helpful to you to hear from other gardeners.
Family is good isn't it? It sounds like you had a hard job in that period; and I hope you're enjoying the rewards of your labors many years ago. My daughter's great.
Melissa

I see that in my first post on my gardening methods I used an incorrect (and misleading) phrase. When I was talking about letting small herbaceous plants grow among and under the roses I called them an "organic mulch". I should have called them a "living mulch", which in fact is the expression I used later.
Melissa