I buried a few of mine in their pots last year and they did just fine. I dug the holes deep and sank the rim of the pot 4-5 inches deep. My only suggestion would be to somehow mark the exact location of each pot or be very careful when digging them up in the spring. Once I located my pots underground it was a bit of a struggle to get the heavy wet soil off the canes without breaking them off. I have a few late season bands that I may over winter with this method again this year.

Leaving them in the pots is far more convenient but poor drainage is a serious danger. When an unpotted plant is in the ground, water can depart from the roots in all directions and at all levels. When a potted rose is placed in the ground, water can depart from the roots only through the hole in the bottom of the pot, and then only by moving through the relatively compacted soil at the bottom of the planting hole. I would either unpot or, better yet, just move the potted roses into an attached, unheated garage after the plants become dormant.

Mike - I have a detached unheated barn. I park a truck there in the winter, and have a little hencoop built into one corner, so I am in and out of it daily in the winter.

The one time I tried to overwinter a potted rose, I put it in there, loosely wrapped in a black trash bag. It was a big rose, in a pot that was about 2' tall and more than 18" across. I watered it before I put it in, sometime in late October. I loosely folded the top of the bag over. In March I looked at it, and there was spindly pale green growth, so I pulled back the bag. In April I started to put it outside during the daytime, pushing it back into the barn at night. I started to leave it out in late April, the time I usually am planting any new bareroot roses and when the rugosas have begun to show signs of waking up. But the new growth stayed spindly, the old canes showed no sign of leafing out, and it was dead by mid May.
So - any idea what I did wrong, or suggestions to avoid a repeat?

n my garage, the roses start breaking dormancy in late February. At this point in time, unlike the entire rest of the time they are in there, they MUST HAVE light and water. Pretty much every year it surprises me how early this starts. If I haven't started watering them and moving them outside by the second week in March, I've got problems. The smaller pots are dead from lack of water, and the larger pots have put so much energy into worthless growth that they've been seriously set back. Usually by late April, they are out for good, barring a serious cold snap. A couple of weeks after that is when they get set in their permanent summer positions, a decent haul away from the garage.

If the rose made it until March, that means it didn't freeze to death in the barn. As an attached garage, mine gets enough heat leakage from the house to reliably stay above 20°F. The pots are put against the connecting wall.

"f the rose made it until March, that means it didn't freeze to death in the barn."

It might have been critically injured, though. Apparently the old canes froze. Roots are said to be more tender than tops. Maybe there was a little life left around the graft and not much else. I once had a potted rose make very feeble growth and then die back after winter even though most of the canes seemed to be sound when I first checked in March. I thought maybe it was root damage. It wasn't a big pot. I'd guess tender roses in zone 5 need more protection than an unheated building that might cool to 5 degrees. Heaping stuff around the pot might be enough to save it, though.

I'm not trying to revise what Mad_Gallica said about the schlepping, however.

In another thread, Stefan suggests burying the pots sideways in the garden. This might obviate the drainage issue that Mike mentioned. In a warmer zone, what I do is pile leaves over the smaller pots sitting on the pavement.

Yes. Bury them on their sides. Just remember to mark at least the base of the pot with a sturdy stick so you'll know where to dig in the spring. You won't lose a single plant this way.

Stefan

This may be a really dumb question but I'm going to ask anyways... Who cares about drainage if the pot/soil are going to be FROZEN all winter long???

Ok, the barn can get down to zero or even below - whatever the outside temps are, it's not much warmer in there. The hencoop in the back corner is overbuilt, thick walls and insulated, and I put a big old detergent jug of hot water in there when it gets frigid outside, and that keeps them cozy - there were only three nights last winter when the water in their drinking fountain was frozen in the morning. Small coop, six hen bodies generating heat, plus that water jug kept that corner warm. Just outside the coop, a forgotten bucket of water was frozen solid by morning. So - it may just be too cold there for the roses.
Re the drainage problem - since I plan to move them to their permanent home next year, and none of the pots are "good" ones - all came from recycle heap at dump - why not cut holes around the base with a heavy utility knife?
I am leaning to the inground solution, cutting extra drainage.
BTW - tried ask.com with the topic "winter protection for potted roses" and came up with great detail on how to do the bag thing. I just don't know about the temperature issue....

I think they were considering sinking the pots upright in the ground well before it freezes... so the plants would experience wetness in fall, warm spells during the winter (unlike in, say, Minnesota, where winter thaws are quite uncommon) and then again in the spring as the ice melts. In that case, drainage is a special consideration.

Thanks Stefan. That makes a little more sense. Mine were buried probably late November last year and dug up as soon as the ground thawed enough to do so in the spring. Those that were buried came out looking fabulous.

Drainage is a special consideration, and one that gets trickier the more I think about it. Burying roses for the winter is something I have extremely little second-hand knowledge about. I know one person who does it, and it's hard to tell what site-specific oddities he is or isn't dealing with.

To start with, fall is our rainy season, as much as we have one. It's also when the deciduous trees start going dormant, so they pull up considerably less water in December than they do in August. Aside from surface drainage, it seems to me that the soil is every bit as soggy in March as it is in October. And that isn't taking any snow into consideration.

Without snow insulation, frost enters the ground from the top down. It leaves in the opposite direction, from the bottom up. It takes a lot of energy to thaw out water, including water in soil. This is one of those obvious things that took me a while to figure out. The temperature characteristics of dry soil resemble the temperature characteristics of air - it's a relatively good insulator, but warms and cools relatively quickly. The temperature characterisics of wet soil resemble the temperature characteristics of water - it's a relatively poor insulator and warms and cools slowly, with an extreme delay due to the energy change necessary to change water to ice and vice versa.

When it comes to winter protection and roses, there is far more in this than I have so far teased out. What I've got so far, is that it takes considerably more wet soil to provide the same insulating qualities than dry soil. Another point is that when the soil is thawing out, there is a rock-like drainage barrier at the frost line. Because it takes so much heat to warm up the water, the frost line moves very slowly. So unless there is a significant change in level, which allows the water to escape, any given soil level can spend several days sitting in water until the soil thaws out enough to let the water sink to the next level.

When you add snowmelt into this, you see why a very extended Mud Season is normal. You can also see why going inside and avoiding the entire issue has become quite common. When we were in Maine for a HRF convention years ago, they talked about a local nursery that buried their leftover roses in a hole in a barn. The southerners thought it was one of the looniest things they'd ever heard.

Ok then, IN the barn AND in the ground! Darn - my barn has a poured concrete floor.....
This is beginning to feel like an RD Laing episode....(you've got to remember the sixties to get THAT reference...)

I do remember. It's OK to be crazy.

Thanks Michael, that may help me feel better about my state of confusion but WHAT does it mean for the Freakin' roses????

The nice thing about burying roses on their sides is that it's so easy to stretch a tarp over the area or lay down plywood or styrofoam for the winter as protection against wetness. I've always done my burying in Minnesota in a raised vegetable garden with fairly moisture-retentive loam that's dark in color, for whatever that's worth. It may thaw slightly faster than the surrounding landscape.

I wonder if the roses could be kept in the barn under a pile of straw or something. There would be ground heat coming through the slab at 40 degrees or so, except close to the edge. Or is there room in the henhouse? What you want is a range of around 20-40 degrees.