Either pot them on or plant them out. In hot weather, tiny pots can dry out completely in a short time.

I'd plant them as soon as possible to give them as much time as possible to get settled in and get some root growth before winter. It sounds as though these are own root and that's good but still plant them a little bit deeper than they are in those tiny pots. Since they're so small I'd put some kind of tall markers, so you don't step on them or something by accident. And for this winter, at least, they will need some protection.

Can I use those hard pvc plant covers?

Here is a link that might be useful: plant cover

I think those are only supposed to be used for frosts and not winter protection. If you want to use something like that they make things called rose cones. Personally I don't like them because: 1. you have to cut the rose really short to get the cones on and I do not hard prune in the fall, only in the early spring and 2. they make great petri dishes for breeding fungus because they are a sort of sealed environment and it can get too moist and actually too warm inside them. I'd just mound them up with either soil or mulched leaves. I make collars out of empty plastic milk jugs to hold the mulch in place but you can use chicken wire or stakes and burlap. What ever you have around to use as a little fence to hold it in. If you do use the cones if they are not ventilated already punch holes in the top for some air circulation.

In the east, once you start thinking in terms of 'winter protection', you've already lost the game. Winters are too unstable and too wet for that.

I don't quite understand what you're trying to say, Mad? Do you mean shouldn't winter protect or shouldn't buy roses that need winter protection or....?

A new band rose will probably need some protection at least the first winter until it can mature to a decent size above and below ground. I don't winter protect all my ground roses, just my potted ones, but these tiny little guys are a special case I feel. If I get them very early in the spring and they've had time to grow up to some size and root mass over the season I may not cover them. But this is late in the season now for planting new roses and they probably won't be able to achieve enough growth to withstand the brunt of a full PA winter with out some help.

I planted a baby band zone 6 rose in the ground last August.
It was eaten to the ground twice by rabbits. Then I decided I didn't want that rose anyhow and I totally forgot about it.
To my surprise it leafed out this Spring... lol

I do not protect here because our winters are way to wet.
I tried it once with leaves and got bad cases of canker.
Try to get roses that will not need protected and plant them in the Spring time.

In a place where it is very common for winters to include a lot of rain and snowmelt, the standard winter protection does more harm than good. So planting anything with the idea that winter protection is going to be enough to push it through the winter isn't really a viable plan. It's the big reason we talk so much about wintering over roses in the garage. Since garages are dry, the moisture problems in the outside world aren't an issue.

Now a lot of this is going to depend rather precisely on where the OP lives. Over the years, I've heard enough people refer to parts of SE Pa that are a pretty solid zone 7 as zone 6 to be equally flexible in my outlook. BTW, that includes Longwood. Its when you get farther north, closer to Reading, that cold becomes an issue.

@ mad~ I am in Philadelphia. Our winters get pretty bad with temps in the teens on some winter nights. @ seil, can I protect it while it's in a pot? Or does it have to go in the ground? It starts getting cold here around late October or early November and I doubt that it will get a substantial amount of growth by that time.

Ok, now that we have determined you live in the tropics :-), definitely either repot them or plant them in the ground. Do *NOT* even *think* about any form of winter protection. It just doesn't get cold enough where you live.

BTW, our version of 'pretty bad' is more than 30�F colder than yours. Your winter temperatures run closer to the winter temperatures in my garage than the temperatures outside.

Thanks, Mad, that's what I needed to understand. I'm in zone 6 and it gets pretty darn cold but winter is our driest time of the year so I don't have that problem. Even the snow is dry as weird as that sounds. The thing that is worst for my roses is the fluctuating temperatures. It can be 40 in the daytime and below zero at night. Or we can go a week or ten days in the teens and then have a week in the 30s and 40s. The roses get confused, try to bud out, then freeze, then thaw, back and forth. I've found that they can only do that so many times before the stored energy in the roots and canes just gives out and they die. Mulching them insulates them from that yo-yoing effect to some degree. I look for a hard freeze to get them dormant and then winter protect to try and keep them dormant until I know the temps will stay warm enough for them to start growing.

Yes, Natural, you can winter protect pots. I have 30 (it was as high as 60 last winter) in pots that I've been winter protecting for 6 winters now. If you have a garage, and with only two to protect, I'd say put them in the unheated garage for the winter. Put them up on pot trolleys or blocks off the cement floor (Michaelg thinks I'm nuts about that BTW, lol) and remember to give them a little water every month. It's doesn't have to be a lot but they're dormant, not dead, and need some water. Desiccation will kill a rose quick too. A lot of people I know who garage their pots will take a shovel full of snow when they shovel their driveway and put it on the pots to water them. I do that with the one and only rose that will fit inside my shed, the tree rose. It gets the prized spot because I can't winter protect that top graft in the pot ghetto. All the rest of my pots winter outside on the back, south facing, wall of my house. I group them all together, drive in wood stakes, surround the whole thing with burlap and then pack it with leaves. In 6 years I've lost way more roses in the ground than in the pot ghetto. And those were usually sickly going in. And don't do it too early. I don't do mine until after Thanksgiving usually. Like I said you want to make sure they're completely dormant and then keep them dormant until night time temps are consistently above freezing. So don't get itchy in the spring (a bad habit of mine) and pull them out too soon either.

Hope all that helps and if you have any other questions, ask away! Through trial and error I've done most everything you can do wrong but eventually figured some things out, lol!

We have yo-yo effect also where I live. I remember a couple of years ago, we had tornados the day after Christmas because we were in the high 60's. Two days later it was in the 20's and just awful, with 30 mph gusts. It's also quite wet throughout winter. We have mud from November through April under the snow. I throw shredded leaves around the bases of the roses, but nothing fancy and no chicken wire or any structure to hold them in place.

What I'm learning is that no matter what I do or don't do for winter protection, the biggest problem I have every year is the variability of springtime weather. Every time I lose something, it's because of temperature/rain volatility and not because of winter kill. Getting an inch of rain every day for 2 weeks when temps don't get above 40 makes a real mess of your plans. So does a quarter inch of ice after Easter.

I think the neighbors would frown upon a greenhouse that encompasses our entire property.