At 3x the normal rate of fertilizing, you certainly could be inviting some problems. You are applying fast (soluble) nitrogen at a rate that could burn on a hot day or if plants run temporarily short of water. (About half the N in Rose Tone is soluble or fast N.) Plus slow N is building up in the soil, and that will eventually be released as fast N.

Also, you are applying a vast excess of phosphorus and potassium. These will both build up in the soil if there is clay content, and K will build up if there is organic content. A large excess of any nutrient can cause deficiencies within the plant of other nutrients. There is also the possibility of toxicity from boron or other trace minerals that you are applying at 3x the requirement.

As to the effect on the plant habit and bloom, I don't know. A lot of the extra fertilizer is just being wasted. There might or might not be an undesirable effect on vigorous shrubs that tend to produce a lot of vegetative growth during July and August. With these, I cut back on feeding after the first flush. Remember, you are still pretty much in the first flush, the time of year that roses are going to bloom regardless.

Wretched excess is the MO of many rose gardeners, but it doesn't usually lead to good results overall.

I am also guilty of over feeding. Jubilee Celebration has great blooms but the plant itself is floppy and weak. Eden has a zillion blossoms but no pink edges and she is short ( year 4). Sometimes I think I am boosting blooms at the sacrifice of a strong plant and root system. Lots of my seemingly healthy roses are not as prolific as they were the first year I planted them even tho they live thru zone 5 winters. I am a bloom junkie...sigh

Over fertilizing is also not healthy to our water supplies, especially if you live close to a body of water. The extra nutrients get flushed into rivers, streams, lakes, etc. where they cause harm by enabling explosions of algae.

Yes, and excess nitrate will flush downward when it can pollute groundwater.

Contaminate the groundwater.
Set the conditions for algae bloom.
Invite aphids.

Forgot to mention, also damages the soil. Lots of chemical fertilizer is hard for the beneficial microbial life in the soil to take.

Ok, Jeffcat, let's take the pledge. I think I am so anxious after this dismal spring; I just try to compensate in an inappropriate way.

Just like anything else done in excess, it's eventually going to catch up with you. Or in this case, your roses.

Excess phosphate will damage the mycorrhizal component of your soils, and thus hinder nutrient up take by the rootlets.

Personal rose story: For a niece's wedding, when I'd only had a garden here for three years and had only about fifty roses, I pushed them for bloom production. Weekly feeding with bloom pushing fertilizer for fifty days before the wedding and watered every other day. I got the roses I wanted for that day.
Downside: even before the first freeze, I had lost some bushes to cold weather. Others didn't make it through winter. The next winter was colder (significantly colder) but I lost fewer roses...likewise the following year. And I finally started trying to figure what had happened. I had pushed growth so much that there was NO hardening off of canes and the things never got around to storing starches to go into winter.

In Columbus, you'll need to ballance summer growth versus getting the roses ready to survive winter. I think for each of us with four seasons, this is a ballancing act that is for each of our gardens a bit different.

I have a short summer and never fertilize after August. I also only fertilize with Gardentone (too lazy to go for Rosetone & also Gardentone for other stuff). I put down a few handfuls around each bush. I do that once in early spring (about the same time as I do the first pruning of the season, about when the forsythia blooms), and then again once approximately every six weeks. I don't get maximal growth or bloom, but absent a freakish winter (as we had a few years ago where it was in the 60's all the way to January, and then suddenly brutally cold in early Feb.) I don't have much winterkill, even on my two hybrid teas (that grow in mostly shade, getting only some morning sun). Even in that freak winter those HT's died below ground, but they were own-root and so they appeared again in July. Those canes were winter-killed a bit this last winter, but I have two Fragrant Cloud blooms sitting in a bud vase on my dining room table as I write this.

(Yes, my number of bushes is tiny, tiny, tiny, but I live in a townhouse in a ten-unit condominium complex in a city, so there isn't much room for landscaping, let alone a serious rose garden.)

I do not fertilize within 6 weeks of predicted frost.But prior to that date...duck and cover.

Two points.

1. Label instructions are generous. Does the manufacturer want you to be thrifty with their product? No, they want you to use it up and buy some more. The labeled dose is calculated to provide the amount of nitrogen that will support rapid growth, but less than what will burn. Most compound fertilizers contain much more phosphorus than plants can use, but that has been put in because it doesn't burn plants, and consumers mistakenly think it will help.

2. Excess fertilizer doesn't help plants grow faster. It is not like animal food, where the more you are fed, the fatter you grow. Fertilizer nutrients are only raw material for the factories in the leaves which produce the real plant fuel (sugars and starches). The amount of fertilizer that the plant can use depends entirely on how big the leaf area already is and how much sunshine the leaves catch. When you supply an excess of raw materials, they can't be used and simply pile up as pollutants.

I have done the same thing. My experience, especially with Miracle Gro is that they got so much nitrogen that the plants turned into Jolly Green Giants with growth but produced very few blooms. I don't use soluables at all any more. I have noticed that the roses bloom much more with just using organics.
Nancy

Jeffcat,

Just out of curiosity I would love to see pictures of your Pat Austin or any other rose which you think is growing super vigorously.
As many other have said, I would be concerned with mineral buildup in the soil.

Masha

Masha,

These plants are new this year, so by "typically" he means this past May and by "lately" he means the past few weeks.