In the UK November is considered the best month to plant bare root roses. Ideally the ground should not be wet but should still have some warmth in it from the summertime sun.
Here we plant our roses in November as soon as we have a dry enough day and preferably one that isn't too windy either. Being on the side of a hill the wind is one of our biggest challenges pretty much on a daily basis.
This year we had so many to plant that it was a crack of dawn start. Fortunately we have the farm Gator to use for carting the bare root roses to the plots. Much easier than barrow upon barrow being pushed around.
Here's the Gator loaded up and ready to go the field with another load ready to be planted. It gets used daily - hence the mud splattered all over it.
Planting time is pretty monotonous and back breaking work. We have a system though which goes something along these lines.....
Pop a bundle of bare roots in a bucket of goo.
Dig hole
Take a bare root out of the goo bucket.
Place bare root in hole and spread the roots out.
Close up the hole.
And so on and so on.
The 'goo' is a mix of water and Mycorrhizal fungi granules. Once mixed it ends up a similar consistency to wall paper paste and we find that this 'goo' gives our newly planted roses a better start than if we were to just sprinkle a few granules of Mycorrhizal fungi in the planting hole. Plus it's slightly quicker too.
My ability to plant in straight lines is nigh on non existent, hence the string - and even that's become wonky.
On average we can plant 450-500 Roses in a day until it gets too dark for us to see what we're doing - it just gets a bit too fiddly trying to move tractor headlights to shine in the right place so that we can carry on planting at night.
Fingers crossed these will all be nicely established and ready for cutting beautiful British grown roses from May onwards and all through the summer for us to ship out to our Florist friends and customers all over the UK.
We've planted a few new varieties and I can't wait to see them blooming.
Cath