When you wake up to a little bit of snow on a fall morning it’s a great reminder that time has come to think of some fall chores for our plants.
Well it’s, it’s just a simple piece of plastic but you know it’s called a rose collar and we’re going to use it to to wrap around the base of the rose and then we can fasten it. It comes with little pins you can fasten it makes a little more secure, but basically you’re going to wrap it around the base of the rose and then fill it with mulch to protect the graft of the rose.
Tuck it in there and then again to make it maybe a little more secure you may sink it into the ground just a few inches.
Just to keep a little more stable. It comes with little holes. Bobbie-like pins, you can put in there. These are totally reusable so you want to save them from one year to the next. Plug that into the hole and it’s pretty secure, like so.
Okay, and then we’re just going to fill it. Fill it with mulch and obviously going to be covering leaves and branches, because you know especially for growing hybrid tea roses or grandiflorus that the visible part of the rose the above ground portion has been grafted to a different route system.
That graft is a little more susceptible to our temperature fluctuations, diseases, insects, that on that exactly where that graft is. Choose some very loose mulching and you don’t want anything is going to pack down. Yeah and really any type of wood mulch product on the market is fine. I love a western red cedar which is shredded.
So we’re going to just kind of firm that in there and typically you would put this on after we get a good steady cold spell.
Maybe a week or so of good cold temperatures. Real roses really get the idea that it’s time for winter. So generally speaking maybe mid-October the window of mid-October to mid-November is when you would put this on.
And if we hadn’t had good steady cold weather by middle of November you take the initiative and put it on yourself. Chances are we’re going to get a hard frost at that point and this is going to protect that graft.
Well, it’s a great thing to do to protect your roses so you don’t end up buying a whole slew of new roses next year. Unless you just want to expand your rose garden, which would be wonderful too! A little TLC for your roses now can make all the difference next spring once the weather kind of milds up and it’s steady you can go ahead and pull those collars off and your roses will be happy as can be.
As found on Youtube