Protect Your Roses This Winter

If you have planted roses, it is important to know how to protect your roses through the winter season to keep them healthy and happy all year round. 

Roses are beautiful flowers that bloom in the summer and create an atmosphere of warmth and happiness. While roses thrive in many places during the spring and summer, however, roses require a lot of care and attention during the winter because they can face damaging wind, cold and ice during the winter months.

To keep your roses healthy and looking great year after year, you should take extra steps to protect them during the winter.

1. Right Variety

The first step in helping roses survive winter is planting the appropriate varieties for your area. Roses are one of the most popular flowers during the winter months. However, some rose varieties do not withstand freezing temperatures, and others may be more suitable for a particular environment.

There are many varieties of roses that can be planted in the winter. They range from pink, red and white to yellow. While hybrid teas are quite beautiful, they don’t fare well in cold winter weather. If you live in areas that get very cold and have harsh winds, choose a hardier variety that will have a better chance of survival.

2. Fall Prep

In order to fully protect your roses from cold winter weather, take steps in the fall to help your roses go dormant with ease. Dormancy is an important part of the life cycle of plants and flowers. It helps them to thrive and grow when they are needed again.

Stop fertilizing your bushes sometime around mid-august. (The exact date should be adjusted depending on how early or late your area freezes.) If they are completely dormant by the time winter weather arrives, they’ll have a better chance of making it.

3. Winter Proofing

Once winter arrives, then you can take extra protective steps. In many rose varieties, the damage is not caused by freezing, but by alternating of freezing and thawing. To properly winterize roses, you should let them freeze; then take steps to keep them frozen for the season.

After your area has experienced several hard freezes, you should mound about a foot of compost around the bottom of your bush to protect the roots and base. You should then protect the branches by adding another foot of mulch. This will help insulate the bush and keep it from thawing until it is warm enough to be safe. As an alternative, you can wrap the bush in a small fence or bag and fill this with compost and mulch instead.

If you have a climbing rose bushes, remove the canes from the trellises, attach them to the ground, and cover them with layers of dirt and mulch. If you can’t move them to the ground, try to wrap them where they are. It is important for them to be protected from the cold, but also properly bundled so they don’t break from wind damage.