Hello

First of all, sorry if this is off-topic, hope I got the right forum...

I have no garden, so I'm trying to grow roses in my apartment - a losing proposition, I know, but I'd just love to be able to pull it off. I have already successfully killed a couple of roses. In the process of killing my current one (a Harkness rose), I tried to counter what several sites told me was iron deficiency (leaf veins green, rest of the leaf pale) by adding iron fertilizer (Substral Eisendünger). Immediately thereafter the veins of leaves next to the base of the rose turned yellow, the rest of the leaf followed suit, the leaves then turned dry and fell off. Since the veins on the leaves are the colour of rust, I must assume that I'm a clot and either overdosed the iron, or used the wrong thing to begin with (I have since found other advice indicating that pale leaves are magnesium, not iron, deficiency).

In order to alleviate the problem, I bought a larger pot (45 0 mm), transferred the rose in it, filled the rest volume with peat, overwatered and drained it several times to flush out the iron stuff, bought a dedicated rose fertilizer and apply it very sparingly. This seems to have (almost) stopped the problem of leaves gradually dying off, some of them still have a yellowish streak or two, but seem static and unlikely to fall off. (I know that yellow foliage is usually associated with Mosaic, but my rose's problem doesn't look anything close to any picture of mosaic I can find, nor does it look like any of the usual fungal diseases - black spot, mildew etc.)

The questions:

1) Is my theory about overdosing the iron at all likely? Is there something I can do to remove the damage and help the rose recover? I thought about discarding the soil and repotting it altogether, but I'd never done it before and am likely to do it all wrong, plus I gather that inducing further stress on an already stressed plant probably isn't the wisest of ideas.

2) My rose is now naked half way up. Almost all of the leaves on the old canes are gone, the new growth still has almost all of them. Will the leaves on the lower part grow again, or do I have to radically cut it down to have regular foliage?

3) There are a couple of blooms forming - should I let them bloom or cut them off to save the rose some energy it can use to recover? I'm glad to say that though fluttered, the rose doesn't seem any less energetic - a healthy new cane is growing nicely from the bud union. I also thought of cutting all the new growth off, but that would mean it would start growing again immediately - which might cost the plant more effort than the blooms.

That's it for now, I guess.

Thanks in advance

Horror