Growing Roses in your garden

We all love flowers and, of course, Roses are the most liked flowers by everyone which we want to gift and also wanted to grow in home garden. I had often come across people wanting to grow Roses in their garden either fail or do too many experiments before succeeding.

The few simple steps that you need to take care while attempting to grow Roses in your garden to make it a wonderful experience. Here is a simple list :

1. Know your water better – Rose love water with little acidity.
Water plays key role in growing water and scientifically speaking they like water having PH around 6.5. In simple common words roses like little acid water than what we drink at home. At the best the plain water that we are able to drink is good for Roses but not water that tastes salty. If you have water that tastes salty, just forget growing roses, unless you can get water from some eternal source.

2. Nursery saplings are better than creating your own.
Most people try to make their own plant from flower stems that they buy from nearest florist. It is sure recipe for failure than succeeding in your attempt. Best option is just go to nearest nursery and buy a plant / sapling. If you are living in places like Bangalore or Pune which are floriculture belts, you are lucky and you can try to get Hybrid Rose verities (Dutch ones). Hybrid varieties grow much faster and produce better flowers.

3. Plating care – Red soil is the best, but with lots of cow dung.
Here is how you should try to plant your rose in your garden

• Rose grows better in Red soil and try to get RED soil if you can.
• Make a pit of ½ to 1 feet deep and fill it with mix of 1/3 soil, 1/3 cow dung and 1/3 of coir (coconut husk). More the cow dung or vermin compost, it is better. Just planting should not be deeper than 3-5 inches depending on the plant size. Just make sure that the entire root goes below the soil. .
• Rose requires better sun light – Shadow will kill them. Plant them such that they get enough sun light. Artificial light with yellow radiation (sodium vapour lights) can also help roses – but no replacement to natural sun light.
• Rose loves Rain water – but plant after rainy season. Excess rain may cause certain deceases which can completely kill the plant.
• Select a place that will not cause water logging during rain. Also continuous running water in not good for rose plants.

Often people say sunlight in no good for yellow roses and good for red roses etc. The fact is rose plants require sufficient sunlight. If you try to grow them in shadow you may not succeed.

There are several other tips the could help – eg., pruning the stems that are old / over grown or dead and not bearing flowers etc would do wonders. But above simple steps would do wonders and you will be able to produce enough flowers that even you can gift. If you lot of time in hand, then you can google to find out best practices used by Green house floriculture growers and adapt them.

If you do not have enough space to grow rose plants, there are enough florists and online flower shops for you to order flower gifts like http://www.florstand.com/ etc.

Happy gardening.