Honestly I'm not a super experienced gardener, but last year I had some success with bare root roses.

I dug an extra large hole and I filled put a mound of the good stuff in the bottom... compost, egg shells, and humus. In the meantime I soaked my bare roots in a large bucket so they could get to all the water goodness. Then I sprawled the roots over the mound of compost and filled everything else in. I gave it a good watering and crossed my fingers. They took off like crazy until the high humidity and lots of rain got to them.

They ended up getting black spot and I had to cut a lot of the damage off. I've had a lot of success companion planting with chives since then. It helps deter the fungus and I sprinkle the roses with sulphur-copper dust when the excess moisture gets bad.

Good luck with your roses!

I haven't planted any bare root roses in a couple of decades now, but I have some that I planted bare root in the 1980s that are still alive and bloom every year. (I dug them up and moved them with us when we moved here in 1999 and they also survived that.)

I plant bare root roses pretty much the way Hippie Homemaker described. I do want to add that if you have dense, slow-draining clay soil, you need to either mound up the soil and plant the roses on the mound or berm or build raised beds with stone or wooden edgings to hold the growing medium in place and plant in those raised beds. Roses do not live long when grown at grade level in dense, heavily, highly compacted clay soils that are so common here in OK. They do great in raised beds or berms made by enriching the clay by adding lots of organic matter to improve drainage.

The most common mistake with bare root roses is that either the stores or the purchasers let them get too cold or too dry while the plants still are in the packaging and I think that is one of the most common reasons that bare root roses fail to sprout, leaf out and grow after being transplanted into the ground.

Good luck,

Dawn