I don't want to cage them because i cut the flowers off.

The Caterpillars i've seen eat the petals and leaves. But mostly petals.

i just want to be ready for winter.

Spray Deer Away on the roses, strictly following bottle directions. It's cheaper as a concentrate vs. RTU (ready to use). Apply to ALL surfaces, weekly, the first month, then once every two weeks, the second month. After that, 1x/ month should suffice. Don't forget to religiously stick to the application schedule. Yes, it's expensive, but it saves your roses and the cost of replacements. It's a mix of putrescent eggs and garlic. Apply on a windless day, in late evening. It smells (to humans) for the first 12-16 hours, but after that time, only deer, rabbits and groundhogs will notice the smell and avoid your plants. Other people use shredded Irish Spring soap, but the Deer Away has been more effective. It does not wash off with rain, although you should not apply it within 5 hours of predicted rain.

Have you considered an electric fence such as the farmers use for their cattle? A timer would turn it on and off as you desired. Not cheap but they work as it says in the fine print at the bottom of the page.... have fun.

What does that spray smell like?

toolbelt68 i like cutting the roses off.

Initially, the spray smells akin to rotten eggs and garlic. It can be intense, if you need to spray large areas, so it's best to apply in late evening on a windless night. By morning, you should not notice it, but animals will-which keeps them away from your roses.

I don't have any encouraging words for you. I have tried everything home made and commercial from the ridiculous to the sublime. From cheap to expensive. NOTHING kept deer off my property. They would stare me in the eye and stand their ground while I yelled and stomped and waved my arms like a crazy person. My big yellow lab couldn't even chase them away. My roses were never more than a few inches tall and rarely got to bloom. My husband was so frustrated with me because I kept buying roses. My deer even ate things deer don't ordinarily eat like peonies, irises, lavender, salvias, so there was nothing I could grow. I finally had deer fencing installed and that's been the only thing that works. It's not great looking and not appropriate in every situation. A friend of mine with more trees than I have installed it herself by weaving it (flexible mesh) in and out, around her trees. Good luck. I hope you find something that works.

Clearly after reading flowersaremusic's post, nothing in Eastern Washington is deer resistant! Some neighbors here fenced their property with dual fences-one at 8' and a second, 4' away, at 6' high ( deer are reported to have poor depth perception), but this was exceedingly costly. Another neighbor installed a very tall, swordlike variety of Pampas grass behind his 8' fence, which he reports the deer will not jump over. I see now why Scottish Deer hounds were so popular, at one time...

Give Milorganite a try for the deer. I planted a dozen roses on the front of my fence, where deer don't even have to bother jumping, and every month or so I sprinkle Milorganite around the grass in front of them. The deer haven't touched them yet, fingers crossed.

Caging doesn't prevent cutting .. You either open the cage up to get in or reach through (holes large enough for people arms but small enough to deer heads. We use a wire of varying openings for our blueberries, couple inch openings at the top and tighter at the bottom for rabbits. The cages have been effective at keeping the bushes from being heavily munched until they were big enough to fend for themselves (and too big to keep making new cages), but we can just reach through to pick fruit or prune. You could do similar, and reach through to get your cut flowers.

can the caterpillars reach the roses?

ceilsan32 did you know that there are a lot of minerals that smell like very VERY strong garlic?

If i find some, i should put it around my roses. LOL!

Caterpillars and pollinators are unaffected by caging. The butterflies and moths can fly through the cage to lay their eggs and get nectar, bees and all can also visit the flowers freely, and a caterpillar would be unimpeded from crawling in and out; it could crawl on the cage if a wire were in the way. The cage is only to dissuade larger critters like rabbits and deer.

Here's a heuchera in a cage (I've since sized up the cage):

A rose might need something a bit taller ...

Here are some blueberries caged (I know the green caging is a bit hard to see):

The left blueberry (between the left daffodil and center daffodil, in front of the trees) has a cage made from pea trellises (less effective against rabbits due to all wide spacing), and the right blueberry (between the center daffodil and right daffodil) is in a cage like the heuchera (in fact I might have taken that cage for the heuchera since I was sizing both up).

I have wire cages around most of my roses and hog wire panels around my pot collection on the patio. It might not look the prettiest at first but I've found that my eye (and all the neighbors) soon learns to ignore the cage and just appreciate that there are any roses at all. Deer are persistent and also creatures of habit, so once they have decided that a particular rose bush tastes good they will hit it over and over until it doesn't bother growing back anymore. I haven't found any deer repellent products that are completely effective.

When I've seen peeler poles + black plastic deer netting used the combination worked great and was not particularly expensive or visible, with only the comparatively natural looking poles showing up much. In fact part of the value of the netting was that deer would sometimes blunder into it and then bound away in the opposite direction, as though frightened by the unseen presence.

I've had the same issue with deer and even more so with rabbits. I checked my own root roses that were maybe 2-4 feet going into winter and they've all been chopped down. I assuming that it's either deer or rabbits in the yard. I did notice A TON of deer tracks right by our newly planted Green Giant Arbovitaes (planted in 2020). So frustrating with my roses.

My uncle was an electrical engineer. Neighborhood dogs were killing his shrubs doing their daily marking rounds. He wired up the bushes to give them a gentle shock in the pee-pee and it was funny to watch them cross the street to avoid his yard long after he unplugged the bushes. Ever since, I've been a fan of shock treatment. My friend used shock collars and buried electric wire in her yard for one month. Her neighbor also collard her dog. Funny to watch the dogs "visit" with each other over the defunct wire trench. They would not cross it after a very short time. Try similar on your roses with the deer. If isn't cruel, just a quick way to train them.

I covered my roses with cones in fall b4 the freeze.