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Summer can be punishing even for the hardiest species of roses. You have to take extra care during these months because if you don’t your roses will not live to see the autumn. The good news is that it not as hard as you may think to take care of your roses in summer.
Here is what you should do:
• At the peak of summer when it is really hot you should water your roses heavily in the morning and in the evening. Roses are thirsty plants so you need to make sure not to skip – they will start to wither. You want to water at dawn and dusk because at these time the temperatures are not high enough to lead to evaporation. You can water using a watering can but if this gets to be too much for you then you can buy an automated sprinkler system – they aren’t too expensive and all you have to do is set them.
• On very hot days you may notice that your rose blooms are wilting. You can make them look fresh again by giving them a blast of cold water from a hose. Make sure that you don’t blast them too hard – you may end up blasting the blooms right off. You may end up having to do this more than once or twice a day.
• Pruning is vital in summer. When you prune you take out all the dead and dying foliage so that your plants can get maximum nutrition. In addition to that pruning also allows for airflow which means that your plants are not at risk of getting diseases. Also, by pruning you get rid of moist places where insects hide to lay eggs and multiply. Pruning is not hard. It involves cutting dead stems diagonally near where they meet the main stem. In fact, pruning will allow new blooms to come in.
If you do all these things and your roses still don’t thrive it could be that they are not getting enough food – roses are also hungry plants and they need to be fed every couple of weeks. You can buy commercially prepared soluble foods such as Miracle-Gro but you can also look up which fertilizers would be best for your soil and climate. If you feed them regularly they should start to perk up and bloom in a week or two and you should have flowers that you can harvest not long after that.