Come fall, it’s important to think about prepping your garden for winter. In Michigan, roses need a good drink of water, a thorough cleanup and a new warm dressing for the chilly months ahead.  

Follow our steps to prep your roses for winter:

• Thoroughly water the soil around the plants after the first frost, but before the ground freezes.
• Discontinue the use of high nitrogen fertilizers that encourage growth until the spring. Protect plants from fungus and disease with a spray, such as Bonide All Season Spray. The spray coats the plant to control disease and fungus, and acts as a smothering agent against insects, such as aphids, mealy bugs, and more.
• Do not prune shrub roses until they are dormant. This can be as late as December. Roses die from the top down, so save as much as you can on top, cutting back to three to four feet high if they are big and you want to keep them big. Cut them down to 1 foot tall if you want to keep them relatively short or rejuvenate them. 
• Garden roses need to be protected through the winter months with a rose cone, which is an insulated top hat that covers the rose canes and keeps winters worst from getting to the plant. Roses need to be cut back to fit within the cone.

• For climbing roses, remove all but the strongest 3-4 canes, then use a rose collar around the graft or crown. This gets filled with mulch to insulate the graft until it is removed in the spring. Another method is ‘heal in’, which is when you remove the rose from its structure, dig a trench and bury the whole plant through the winter. Use stakes to keep the canes held down so they don’t work their way out of the ground.

• Heal in is also the way Tree roses are prepared to make it through the winter months.
• The head is cut back to about 10” from the graft, and half of the roots are dug up. This allows the tree rose to be laid on the ground and secured with stakes. Cover the entire plant with soil then mulch. Uncover and replant in the early spring, after freezes have past. The tree will have to be staked straight until the roots grab ahold again, use Espoma Bio-tone Starter Plus.
• An alternative is to grow tree roses in pots and move them into a cold garage during the winter months, cut the head back to about 10 inches and water about once a month in the winter. Bring back out in the spring once the temperatures are above 35 degrees.