After seeking input last year on getting my Pink Simplicity roses to bloom better, I decided to do two things this year:
- Give them a lot more water. I’ve been putting a soaker hose on them for an hour or two once a week, sometimes skipping a week, but trying for once a week. I’ve been doing this since early April, when they first began leafing out. I also opened up some drip emitters that I had shut off before, because I had thought back then that they were getting too much water. This advice to give more water came from folks on the Gardenweb.com rose forum when I showed them photos of the little flowerbuds drying up and falling off. The consensus was that our dry air here was causing the shrubs to prematurely abort those buds at a joint where they are later meant to separate from the plant after the flowers are spent.
- Give them more fertilizer. I’ve been spraying them with Miracle-Gro about once a week, missing a week here and there. It’s just a quick wetting of the leaves with the fertilizer, using it as a foliar feeding, not a soil soaking.
It’s working fairly well, because they’re now all blooming, including two that get shaded by my nectarine tree, which have almost never bloomed in the past. It still took a long time for the first bloom wave — it didn’t happen until just this last week or two. But there are many, many flowerbuds still developing, and it looks like I’ll have a strong, continued bloom season. I’m still disappointed that they grow so tall before they bloom. I cut them back to around two feet high in the spring, but they still got six feet tall again before blooming. Here are some photos from this week:
Hi Victor, I don’t live in that house anymore, but my ex still does. The roses are still there, and I’m not sure how the bloom is going. Someday when one of our kids gets married, we’ll probably have a wedding reception back there, and I’ll probably get involved in getting the roses in shape that season. We’ll see what happens.
Any updates on your progress?
We’re getting into a second peak bloom this week, and it’s not quite as good as the first wave, but it’s pretty good. I’ll have to take a photo and make a new post.
I posted at GardenWeb, thanking the forum members for helping with these roses, and I got a few interesting responses. One was that these roses *are* a tall variety and suggested a few others to consider if I wanted a shorter hedge. This is what she said:
“Many of the Polyanthas are lower-growing. I have ‘Lady Reading’ and what we think is ‘Orleans Rose.’
Those are more bushy, and maybe 4 ft. tall.
Tip-Top — a Lambert Poly-Tea — runs about 4 ft.
The Harkness Floribunda, ‘International Herald Tribune’ goes maybe 3.5 ft., tops.
There are many more in that range.”