I was literally up at 2am last night pacing around in my pajamas staring out at my rose garden wondering if I'd done wrong by the roses. Gah! Please weigh in!
I’ve spent a lot of time reading, watching videos, and thinking through how crazy to go with rose winterizing. I made a choice, finished the work, but now am in a major state of self-doubt. The more I read, the more it keeps me up at night. So much conflicting advice. In particular, I’d be really grateful for advice from people with experience in Z6-7 north-eastern US gardens in which winter means on-and-off freezing and a lot of rain or brief snow which then melts ( @KittyNYz6 !)
(Please forgive the all-caps / long post -- cringe, haha).
MY CURRENT WINTERIZING:
I’ve more or less followed Palatine's winterizing approach (e.g., my roses all have 1/2-1 five-gallon bucket’s worth of wood chip mulch poured gently over their crowns and nestled around the first foot or so of growth). With the exception of a very old (bourbon?) rose that lived here long before me, all of my roses are in their first year. The are mostly grafted onto Dr. Huey, but I also have a sprinkling of OR. They are primarily floribundas and hybrid teas with a few outliers. In my garden on the eastern end of our property, I kept the graft union above the soil line because the soil is clay-based and quite poor draining. In my garden to the west, graft unions were planted below the soil line.
My concerns:
- After extensive reading, I *think* I am gleaning that wetness combined with on-and-off thawing may be far more detrimental than continual, harsh cold or dry cold for roses. If this is the case, my initial thought that our ~Z6b-7a winters wouldn’t be *too* hard on the roses is completely wrong.
- Wood chips retain moisture, so I question whether, in a wet, freezing-thawing-freezing location they are necessarily a good move. Additionally, my wood chips are sourced from a community tree trimming pile, so they are a complete mix of tree varieties and slightly broken down / capable of retaining more moisture than fresh chips.
- I know it has been a particularly bad vole season for local orchards, and I feel like I just built a bunch of “vole temples”! Waaah! I do have a fearsome “Vole Patrol” in the form of four cats, but I have to open and close the deer fence every day for them to be able to get into the rose gardens and I doubt they’ll be as active in the winter.
FEEDBACK:
I am mostly looking for feedback on whether I should leave my mulch cones or pull the mulch away. Much as I appreciate in-depth, creative solutions for collars, buying fancy mulch varieties, etc. I have too many roses and insufficient funds to pull this off (certainly for this year). I’m still very grateful to hear people’s individual solutions, and might be open to giving a few roses special treatment, but I thought it was worth being up front about my current limitations!
MY MICROCLIMATE & SOIL:
ZONE:
-According to USDA maps, we are literally on the cusp line of 6a/6b.
-I think our reality is more like 7a-7b except maybe during occasional harsh winters. We’re on the slope above Cayuga Lake and literally the upper/eastern end of our 8 acres can frost weeks before the lower part, and the field above our property can be covered in snow when we have none, so there’s definitely some microclimate trickery in action! We’ve only lived here two years, so my data is minimal, but I had gladiolus (technically hardy to Z8 but there are reports of them returning in colder zones) and calla lilies (supposedly only hardy to Z8) winter over and reproduce like hotcakes. The giant inherited rose which I think is a bourbon is 7’ tall and suffers zero winter dieback, but has also clearly been established for decades.
SOIL:
East-side rose garden: rich, clay-based, not well-draining (literally squelchy in the spring). Roses thrived here from bareroot season onward, but other than one old, established bourbon(?), none of them have withstood winter yet. This is the eastern-most end of our property, so it also gets the coldest.
West-side rose garden: yard was heavily amended for drainage roughly 15 yrs before we built the house. Has mostly large gravel / coarse rock with newish topsoil. In order to kill off a mega-forest of forsythia, the previous owners chopped down bushes and buried crowns in 4’ of wood chip mulch (local, mixed tree varieties) four years ago. As a result, the roses in this garden are primarily planted in amended soil I carted in which is surrounded by 4’ deep bed of rich, decaying mulch. Overall, this bed tends to run drier and I know the huge amount of mulch in semi-active decay is kicking off heat, which may explain the calla lilies overwintering with glee. First-year roses were fine here in their initial spring, summer, and fall, but definitely preferred the wetter, clay-based eastern garden, where they thrived.
WEATHER FACTORS:
-Our winters are somewhat wet. We rarely get a true blanket of snow and when we do, it’s thin and usually melts within a few days.
-We do have a decent amount of wind, but it mostly harasses the tall trees. i.e., I’m not worried about staking the roses, but leaves wouldn’t work as a mulch—they’d get scooped out of a collar, etc.
Okay…. thanks so much for anyone who managed to read all that. I'm all ears!! Tell me what to do!
KittyNY6
Diane Brakefield
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KittyNY6
Diane Brakefield
KittyNY6
Diane Brakefield
KittyNY6
Jena Ithaca, NY 6a/6bOriginal Author