Judy,
My garden is probably colder than yours. I'm up northeast of Knoxville at 1100' and windy. My treatment of modern roses has evolved from heavy winter cover to none. With heavy cover, I was loosing a lot of canes to rot/canker that came in over winter and got established anywhere there was a small break in the one and two year old canes.
With time, I found that apricot and lavender roses were the most fragile. Just Joey was lovely, but I couldn't get canes through winter whether I protected them or not; I found Abbaye de Cluny to be a stronger rose in the same color range.
Lavender HTs- If I were still trying to grow them, I'd mound pine needles close to the canes and then heavier mulch farther out. This is the treatment I give Susan Louise, which is my most tender rose. (With Susan Louise, which is part R. gigantea-read, very, very tender we also protect it with a large box to cut down on wind damage, and that's marginally enough some years.)

I don't use a Horticultural Oil dormant spray; I want to retain the beneficial insect eggs (and with them, I get the bad guys, too, but I want my good guys to be in the roses at the start of spring.

Some years, I have used Lime-Sulphur Dormant strength spray on the roses. The problem is that when it comes to timing that/those sprayings, it took a couple of years before I got it right.
For me, the first two weeks of January are often right.
I want to time two sprays seven to ten days apart and get the stuff on the roses before the leaf axils start to swell for spring growth. (That swelling is often happening by early February.) I'd like to spray to knock off old leaves (that's one objective) and ideally I'd set back the bud swell by a couple of weeks to keep the roses as dormant as possible through the early February warm.
BECAUSE, that Feb warm is followed by Feb cold.

So, where do you start?
Go to weather underground and find a weatherstation near you. (By zip code) then find a weatherstation with "almanac" data, presented as a graph.
What is most useful there is the historic max and min temperatures; the temp averages, and some of the almanac pages have last years data in graph form.

You'd like to know when to expect cold, followed by warm (and how warm).

Many of your roses won't go dormant, they'll at best enter into a light nap, getting some use out of their old leaves and they green stems. They may start to grow too early next spring; we'd like them to slow down, instead.
You'll even see differences from one side of your house to the other; from low places on your property to sunlit southfacing walls.

Take notes. And ask us how things are going.

(And you have visited the Atlanta Botanical Gardens roses?)

Judy, I don't do a lot. I do spray regularly and have decided to keep spraying every few weeks even through winter. You know how we get warm spells in the winter and it can cause the blackspot to spike a bit.

After the first frost, I do 'top' my roses. That just means I cut back any tall canes so they don't whip around in the winter winds. Since most of my front yard is roses, it also makes the yard look a bit neater if all the rose bushes are the same height (since they are mostly sticks anyway).

I am planning on doing a dormant spray this year. I did last year, but I did it too late and didn't use the right concentration so it did not do much. I want it to knock off the old leaves from my roses. I didn't get to do that last year and for some reason a lot of the leaves never fell off.

One problem I have is that my front yard faces due south and I get a lot of sun directly on the rose beds, which is nice, but as Ann said, I tend to get a lot of early bud swells and basals (new canes) coming up as early as January. The last two years I've had a lot of the new growth damaged because of cold weather. I'm definitely going to prune later this year and also take off a lot more growth. Last year I did it too early and left my roses too tall and they were a bit of a mess early on.

Ann, any idea what "mean" temperature means? I think we need a weatherman.

Carla

"Mean" means average, and average doesn't mean much.

Mean temperature is the point where half the temperatures were above that and half below that particular temp.
Average is a numerical average. With temperatures, the mean would be the ballance point and I prefer it to average. I've mentioned that the historic lows for my area were -20sF. If you were to average that over a five year period, the implication would be that the temperature was a lot colder- it wasn't, but for the one year.
And on another graph, a more local one, it shows we got into the 60s for three days in early January of this year.

Gardening becomes an effort first to do no harm, and then to try to help the plants do what they are going to do, sometimes in spite of their own instincts.

Here is a link that might be useful: How bad/cold it has gotten

Thanks Ann. You are now our weatherwoman. What product do you use for dormant spray, I wonder if one is better than the other for our part of the country.

Carla

Thanks alot Ann and Buford!! I too was wondering what brand of dormant spray you both use too? The side of my house where the majority of my roses are gets tons of morning sun and early afternoon sun. So I guess I probably need to spray a dormant spray middle to late Feb. Last year I pruned what roses I did have in Feb so I guess I will spray in Feb and prune early March. I will definitely look up the chart and try to pin point it better before Feb gets here. Thanks ladies for all your help. Judy

I use a spray that is called Lime-sulphur. I buy it from our Farmer's Co-op (and the brand I have now is Bionide). It's a product used by orchards, as well, so that might help you search for it in larger than pint size. Mine has dormant strength dilution of one cup LS per gallon of water.
Judy, Mid to late Feb may be too late for you. Start watching in late December. There is a point where the buds start to swell and you'd have about a week to react. The LS dormant strength needs to be applied by someone wearing a serious respirator AND goggles AND old clothes. The LS doesn't wash off the rose canes and you don't want to spray it onto the side of your house.
It stinks of sulphur=rotten eggs.

As for when to prune: you can take dead canes off anytime. And for some of the thornier roses, cutting the dead canes out is easier to do when you are armed with heavy clothes protecting your arms.

YIKES!! That sounds like some serious stuff. I was thinking that since you have a little bit colder weather that I might should push spraying back but I guess I should move it up. My mind doesn't think too straight anyway! I appreciate your advice and I am so grateful to have someone to ask for help. I have a new Just Joey and love it. You mentioned it dieing in your zone so I wonder if I need to protect it. It was new this spring for me. Thanks, Judy

Start saving/finding pine needles now for Just Joey. (And for those wonderful HTs Brandy and Color Magic). I'm not alone in finding them among the more tender roses.
For pastel wonders, they are among the finest HTs and they are divas in the worst sense of the word: Edmunds, back when they were awesome and greatly respected rose sellers who grew their own stock, used to warn that some people would grow Color Magic as an annual.
You want to come up with a well draining mulch that will protect from the cold, that will not knick the canes and that will keep water and critter away from the canes.

Ann, is there any dormant spray less toxic than LS? I shouldn't be spraying at all, health issues.
Maybe DH will have to suit up, sometimes it's scary to let a man spray!

Thanks,
Carla

Do a search on Bordeaux mixture.
I haven't compared the two, but it has a similar function.
A straight sulphur spray would be a third alternative.

Problem is: I've done a lot of scholar searches on Google lately, and winter sprays get almost no studies done. The research goes primarily to summer problems and/or problems of roses growing in hot houses/green houses/glass houses.

I have wondered if LS painted on Pat Austin would suppress (although I doubt it would cure) the red spots that seem to take over Pat's canes every spring.