Your roses aren't dormant. Use the Lilly Miller Polysul summer dilution.

Some roses are much better stripped - - anything with rust, anything with Old European in the background, mosses, hybrid perpetuals. You can cut the leaves off any what won't fall easily. Don't bother with the Teas and Tea Polys, although the early flush will be marred by old leaves dropping. You'll have a mix of old and new foliage on them until March or so. On evergreen roses, the new leaves push off the old.

Berndoodle's right. Absolutely on-target.

Taking it one step further, we have eliminated the serial-rusters
"anything with Old European in the background, mosses, hybrid perpetuals."
Those roses are gone.
Tea Roses, PolyTeas, Chinas, Noisettes -- all might get a little mildew until they mature.
Then they're bullet-proof.
And no, I wouldn't ATTEMPT to strip them. Look:
{{gwi:230824}}
this is ONE corner of our garden. Can you imagine trying to strip this of leaves? I can't!

Jeri

I was wondering about that. I have many HTs, so those that haven't lost all their leaves will lose them in pruning. But what of teas and others that I don't want to prune but still have leaves? The new leaves will push off the old?

I think I'll leave most of the teas, they look ok. My two Glamis Castles in pots, however, look very raggedy and the leaves look like heck. But it's too much to snip off and I don't want to prune them. I'll just leave them and see what happens.

Maybe I could fire up the leaf vac and......

Jeri,

I love it when you share pictures of your roses.

Thanks,

Colleen

Buford -- For your Teas -- wait 'til summer, and "sorta prune" them at that time. They tolerate that very well.

Colleen -- THX. It's not a neat, well-groomed garden, but it is the garden we have, and it suits us.

Jeri

Buford, in the south you don't have to wait until summer to prune the Tea's. They tolerate being pruned in the spring well too :-) Yes, the old leaves will eventually be pushed off by the new ones. Looks kind of yucky for a while with all the old leaves still hanging on and falling. I strip any diseased foliage off when I am doing the big clean up in spring.

Carol

Just some thoughts on the chemical aspects of all this: Lily Miller Polysul is a standard lime/sulfur spray. If you spray this at the dormant concentration (1 cup per gallon) you will probably kill the leaves on the plant but do no further harm to your roses. Stripping off the leaves to prevent killing them with the dormant spray strikes me as akin to cutting off one's legs prior to skiing to prevent breaking them.

Lime/sulfur at the growing season concentration (4 teaspoons per gallon) will probably kill off any active mildew infections as well as most of the mildew spores in your garden. However, mildew spores are air-borne and a one-time cleanup isn't really going to solve a mildew problem. If you spray synthetics, one of the most effective mildew fungicides is supposed to be Myclobutanil (Immunox, Eagle, etc.) If you spray only organic-certified sprays, Green Cure's formulation of potassium bicarbonate or just the growing season version of your Lily Miller Polysul would be two of the best. With any of these fungicides, you would have to spray regularly, probably weekly, throughout the season. By the way, the mildews that attack roses are specific to roses, meaning the mildew on your non-rose plants poses no dangers to your roses.

The leaf stripping topic comes up every year. I certainly don't garden in CA, but when I lived in SC, my plants kept their leaves. The new growth pushes off the old ones. The old ones got a bit discolored- almost blackspot looking, fell off, followed by healthy growth. This occurred late Feb-March. Don't know what effect that had on disease, but I was no spray. Mostly Teas, Chinas, some moderns. So I would say, don't strip them, and see what happens.

Thanks everybody! I will use the spray at the "summer" dose, although I guess it really isn't dormant spray then. I did strip leaves off some of my roses: Rose De Rescht, Zephrine Drouhin, and Dainty Bess had rust. Usually it's just Dainty Bess that gets it...I don't know why RdR and ZD have it. I also stripped Lyda Rose and Comte de Chambord and am getting to Felicia. The hybrid musks look practically leafless anyway. The others I will just spray, since I don't see rust on them, (although they all have mildew). I've been eyeing my Celine Forestier on an arch, and she looks so ratty, I think I may spray her hard with the hose to knock as many of the leaves off as possible. I've got to figure out how to prune her since she will grab anybody within 6 feet...but that's another thread.

So I guess the lesson is that here in So Cal, we never "really" spray dormant spray, since our roses don't go truly dormant, do I have that right?

Well, if you really prune them (as you would an HT, or a FL, say) then you would have little worry about leaves.
I know this, because I have done it.

But if you DON'T hard-prune 'em, you will have leaves.
Only, they're mostly old leaves, and no loss (IMHO)one way or the other.

But you're right. Very few roses really go dormant here.
I have ONE which does: R. arkansana. It goes completely dormant, and looks like a dead thing, even here.

Jeri