Now that autumn is here, I’ve been spending time in the evenings putting my garden to bed for the season. Yes, the ragweed count is still sufficiently high to make this a miserable task, but I learned my lesson about skipping this chore last winter.
My all-time favorite flower is a fragrant white rose, so one of my first projects when we bought our house was to plant four Queen Mary II hybrid teas, along with a climbing Iceburg. Unfortunately, the combination of health problems and laziness on my part last year meant that I never got around to wrapping up and mulching my rose plants to prepare them for the change of season. As a result, the freezing ground last winter heaved all four plants out of the soil.
I’d thought about replanting them this year, but opted to focus on our vegetable garden instead. After all, I only have so much time available: why not focus my gardening energies on edible things that I could use to make jams, preserves and bread?
I’ve had two and only two bouquets to grace my kitchen table this year, and both are ones I gathered myself from the peach and orange hybrid rose plants that managed to survive my neglect last fall.
This autumn I’m consciously choosing not to prepare those brave plants for overwintering. I figure the only way to give VH an incentive to bring home flowers is to stop growing my own.
Friday, September 28th, 2007, 8:24 am | 
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September 28, 2007 at 4:22 pm
I have an old rose bush in my back yard that was there before we owned this house (almost 11 yrs. now). This year I was told to put banana peels on the ground (under my mulch). It has more than doubled in size and has had three times as many roses. I also had a minature rose in a pot that was pretty much dead. The banana peel in the pot brought it back and blooming.
All I do to my roses is just cut them back after a couple good freezes, then putleaves and mulch up high over them. Here in Indiana it gets plenty cold, but they’ve done just fine.
Come Spring I’ll uncover them and they’ll get banana peel again.
September 28, 2007 at 4:49 pm
Unfortunately, I’ve ripped out the white roses, but I may be able to salvage the other ones. They really were beautiful this spring.
September 30, 2007 at 9:51 am
Great idea to maximise on return on effort & produce veg for the kitchen. Be warned – you may become obsessed – veg gardening is quite addictive & you may well start giving your friends offerings of veg instead of flowers.
(Hope the VH takes the hint!)