You can prune this month as it is their time to be dormant, apply alfalfa next month. Feed in March and then as per fertilizer instructions. Doesn't matter if it's a bush or a tree.

I don't know much about fertilizer. Is Foliage Pro recommended for roses? I usually use an organic fertilizer, granular stuff.

Do your bushes have fewer canes than when you bought them? Were they in full sun this summer? Were your blooms pretty, or small and damaged looking?

Thanks for that info, garden gal.

Socks, I bought them bare-root and they were in a bucket for a bit but I don’t believe they dried out. I think many of the canes must have died, unfortunately, and without really doing much. (I will have to see if I took pictures when I planted them. I think the canes must have been green at first though. Even I would have noticed if they weren't.)

They get pretty good sun and when they bloomed, the flowers were lovely and smelled good. They are both Firefighter. (I also have an Ingrid Bergman, which is doing better.)

Well, I’m not sure what to do, because it is getting too late today to pull them out of their pots to see the roots. Maybe later this week. It will probably turn out that it is a soil issue of some sort.

Gardengal, just to see if I understand ... do you mean there can’t be new canes at the top on a rose tree? Or, do you mean there can be new canes, but they aren’t called “basal” break since ... it’s the top of the plant, not the bottom?

To be honest, Need, I really don't know. Basal breaks are just that - canes that develop from the base of the plant (root crown). I have no firsthand knowledge as to how it would stimulate cane development on the grafted top, if at all. And there is the possibility that your standard or tree rose is double grafted as well.

My Firefighter tree rose is a crazy grower, so it's not the variety (and frankly mine is a bad tree rose, because the branches are literally four to five feet, so with the 3 foot tree, the blooms are 7 feet in the air, too high to smell--which is the point of Firefighter!)

My experience over many years of growing many container plants (flowers and trees) is that NONE of them like having their roots the same temperature as the "above ground" part of the plant. This is even true with vegetables in ground, which always grow bigger and better with 6 inches of cooling mulch like straw, regardless of how much you water. It's the temperature, not the water issue.

Could that be your problem? Your pot is in blazing sun and cooking the roots?

If you can't plant them in ground, could you place the pots where the pot is shaded but the rose is in sun, like behind a retaining wall? Or maybe put reflective water-heater insulation around it?

Carla in Sac

It absolutely could be one of the issues (although I must also be doing other things wrong ...) These are double potted, but the outer pots aren’t that much bigger, and with most-day full sun, the roots could very well be uncomfortable. And what’s worse, I question my drainage. I feel like it takes too long. I need to start writing things down bc I don’t remember what I put over the holes.

Bit of an update - I decided that there were enough new budlets sprouting that I didn’t need to look at the roots - I wonder if that was a good decision?

I gave one of them a pretty good cut. Maybe too good? Now it’s not doing anything. The few budlets I left on don’t seem to be getting bigger. Little bit of a nail-biter here.

The other that I haven’t pruned yet also has many budlets. Maybe I will go a little easier on it and see if it makes a difference. Meanwhile I will try to get hold of a good book with pictures. I don’t know from canker.

I am glad though that your Firefighter is doing so well!!! Soon I am going to have a bunch of little own-rooters, if all goes well. Not to sell of course, I assume there is a patent. And I have 2 or 3 feet of cuttings still in a vase. One feels guilty just chucking them.

sautesmom, hi!

I just wanted to say that my FF standards/trees are doing the exact same thing - growing super-tall, so much so that I had it in mind to research the parents to see if that would shed any light - and then I happened on this old thread. I'm not sure they were doing that 2 years ago, but now, yesssss.

So, at least I know mine aren't really that odd. Now I just need to keep up with them.