It's been a long time, but I'm happy to be back. My family and I have been away holidaying overseas,
we had a fun and lovely time, but it's certainly nice to be back.
I was a bit concerned my roses would suffer while I was away,
even though we have automatic reticulation system which turns itself on to water the garden at set times.
I was nervous because it's right in the middle of summer here and it gets hot and dry.
We have sprinklers restrictions and are only allowed to water the garden with sprinklers two days a week.
So when I'm home, at least I can manually hose-water in between the two watering days on days I know are going to be scorchers to ease the dryness.
Anyway, I was quite glad to find that my garden actually survived my absence and the lack of water during that time.
Some of the roses' leaves do look a bit dry from water stress,
but overall I could breathe a sigh of relief none of the plants actually died.
One thing I found though was the weeds have gone wild and are "partying" in my garden, urghh!
I'll have to deal with that bit by bit.
When I went out to check the garden, one thing that came to me was "The roses need to be fertilised", which brings me to Tip #2 on growing beautiful roses. Roses are gross feeders, they love love love food and drink, lots of feed all the time, that's a fact.
My fertilisation regime is around every 6-8 weeks or each time I see that there are not so many blooms.
I use NPK Blue. (You can use any rose food or rose fertiliser that you trust)
I also use cow's manure as a mulch and fertiliser(in time you improve your soil condition),
I ocassionally use Sulphate of Iron when I see there is a deficiency in the foliage.
I don't use wood shavings or any wood-based mulches as I've read somewhere that they take nitrogen out of the soil and my experience seemed to have matched that and the plants weren't quite healthy and disease resistant.
I'll try my best to answer your questions in the comments in my last post,
please give me a bit of time, thanks for your patience and interest.
I don't know everything, since I'm considered new in terms of growing roses and I'm still learning and experimenting as I go along. (That's the truth!) But I'll tell you what I know.
Roses used here: Pink Simplicity(Floribunda, pink), Tamora(David Austin, apricot) and The Dark Lady (David Austin, dark red)
Extremely busy but happy and content.....................
And have barely had time to take photos................
Tips on Growing Beautiful Roses #4 : Roses need deadheading. Deadheading simply means cutting off the spent blooms to encourage new blooms. It shouldn't be confused with pruning which is cutting the plant down to 1/3 of its size in wintertime. It's all about where you want the energy to go to when it comes to roses. Often times if spent flowers are not deadheaded, the plant will use its energy to produce rosehips, which often happens in the autumn or winter. I find rosehips on some of my roses in summer when I haven't been deadheading them diligently. The result is less flowers! So the remedy is to cut off all spent flowers, you'll find new shoots appearing in two to three weeks, which should lead to more flowers.
So have I been deadheading my roses? No! Not very consistently lately. Ah, well, will have to go and catch up now..............have a great day everyone, tata!
China Doll Tree Rose
Pink Simplicity 
China Doll Tree Rose
Pink Simplicity 
