I have three potted rosebushes that I’ve named Greg, Effie, and Put-Put for Grigori Effimyovich Rasputin, because they will not die. I haven’t tried to kill them, it’s just that I’ve gone weeks or months without watering them, never given them fertilizer, and never taken a remote interest in them, and yet they keep blooming. They were potted by my mother years ago (big pots obviously) and the soil’s never been refreshed or changed, and their resilience (this week they just exploded in pinkish-orange and yellow and red buds respectively) has officially earned my respect so I want to help.
So, I picked up some potting soil and some Evergrow (? I think that’s right- it’s blue crystals you mix with water in any case) fertilizer. I have never once in my life done anything more complicated with plants than watering them, so my questions are embarassingly remedial and probably howlingly stupid, but I’ll ask anyway-
—should I re-pot the roses in another plot or just add the potting soil to the pot?
—is it necessary/advisable to take some of the old soil out before putting new soil in (there’s room in the pot for more soil)?
—one of the bushes has grown taller than I am [I’m about 6’0] and the top is leaning over. It’s also super thorny (far moreso than the other bushes). Is there any special trick to trimming the top without hurting the rest of the bush, and is there anything I can do about the thorns?
—the red rose bush has a ton of weeds or long grass growing at the bottom, and while the rosebush is still alive and flowering it’s nowhere near as vibrant as the other two. Is there a way to kill the grass without killing the rosebush (it’s all over the bottom of the bush so it’s not like just a little pancake sized patch of it) and should I repot it?
Thanks for any info (and there will probably be more).
Don’t fertilize them a lot. You don’t want all fast growing foliage and stems. Remove some of the soil from the top of the pot if roots don’t fill that layer. Put in organic peat and bone meal mixed. Put in bone meal if you can’t replace the top layer of soil.
Sometimes, and a garden center will have it. There’s straight bone meal and adulterated bone meal. I’d prefer the 100% bone meal, but you can get the others too. Bone meal is slow release over years, the added ingredients release quickly.
Organic peat is black peat soil, not the milled sphagnum.
If you’re going to prune them, please look it up either online or at the library. Just hacking at a rosebush will, in most cases, be counterproductive. You want to cut them at the right places. Consider it more of an extended bris than a general haircut.
And get in there and weed. Pull up the grass and weeds by hand…the pots can’t be THAT big that you need to go in with Roundup (unless you have Audrey III growing on your porch).
Answers depend partly on the size of the rose bushes and pots.
If the roses look outsized compared to their pots, they probably need larger containers. It would be helpful if you could remove them from their pots, and work out some of the old potting medium all around the root ball (by hand or with some blunt implement, avoiding cutting or bruising the roots). Then you can repot with added lightweight soil mix that includes some kind of slow-release fertilizer.
Pruning is more complicated and depends somewhat on the kind of rose you have (how about their real names, Sampiro?), but at least you want to remove dead canes, less vigorous old ones and those that may be crossing and rubbing against other canes. Wear thick gloves. You prune to within maybe a quarter to half-inch of outward-facing buds.
Obviously you are doing something right if the plants are thriving and blooming. So keep doing it.
I figured that they are doing good, so didn’t recommend doing to much either. Had they been anything but thriving I would have said something different.