I'm certainly not one of the experts here, so I can only tell you what I think and what I do. Go ahead and mulch your roses even if the ground is frozen. Actually, I think that's the perfect time to do it. With regards to your roses not getting any sun, I think this is a plus. As I understand it, it's the freezing and thawing that occurs in winter that causes most of the cane damage. We have experienced -5 degrees celcius for the past 2-3 nights and I'm not the least concerned. But, if my outdoor thermometer tells me that it's -12C, I will be very concerned because any colder than -10 in some years can cause us a lot of grief. Having said that, we have gone as low as -17 C in the occasional winter around here, but because we hilled our tender roses well, we pruned below the mulch line and all was well. We too have a pile of mushroom compost sitting in our garden, but the problem is that it is frozen which makes it kind of difficult to use. Take my advice with a grain of salt until you hear from others.

Hi folks I missed this thread the first time around before I started posting, so I thought I'd chime in now. I'm the friend Mindy mentioned that puts the chopped off complete bags of leaves next to but not around the roses, and as a system it works for me and my 700 or so roses. I thought I'd add my 2 cents to Seil's concerns about the bag method, since they're all important issues for rose gardeners. - First, I don't find that the bag disintegrates at all - in fact, I have some extra slices of bags from last year in unused parts of my garden that are perfectly intact, at least on the sides that hold the leaves (not on the bottom, which does sometimes start to disintegrate if moist). - Secondly, everyone is totally right to be wary of protecting roses with any method too early in the season before the ground is fully frozen, because of rodents nesting in the material as well as risking the roses not getting or staying dormant. I wait till the ground is fully frozen - usually around Christmas or a few weeks before that - so the roots stay cold, not warm. The danger in Nebraska and many other highly changeable climates is that the roses here experience relatively long cycles of warming periods in January and February that might disrupt the dormancy, and the point of the protection (at least in my yard) is to temper only the extremes. The bags keep the worst of the winter winds away and encourage the frozen ground to stay relatively frozen throughout January and February, but I uncover when the roses start to leaf out no matter the calendar (like this year was 3 weeks early at least) to keep them from cankering in the now thawed ground. - Third, I find that the bags are really helpful for me, not only in creating air circulation around the base of the plant itself, but also in keeping the main moisture away from the base of the plant. The paper bags are tough enough to keep even soggy maple and linden leaves contained in a solid frozen block of essentially ice that's a few inches away from the actual stem of any roses. I'd rather not collect those kinds of leaves, but when I poach 200 bags or more from neighbors, I can't be too picky (just no dog poop, please!!) I tend to fill in with my own oak leaves that I know will have a lot of air space and never get soggy, but that's only me. I consider these bags like little "down coats" for the roses, that create pockets of protected air around the roses that protect them like your coat protects you, even if it's not at all contacting your skin. The extra (still) air is a layer of protection too, in its way. RpR has my admiration, as that method sounds waaaay harder than what I do - to create wire cages and protect each rose, though I do like the idea of making one giant breathable cover for the whole bed of roses. I saw Karl (RoseNut) years ago post something of the sort where he puts styrofoam or foamboard (or something light) edges around the bed and builds their own little winter garage, but anything that requires tools other than pruners or a watering can strikes me as "work" and roses are "fun". One of the best things I like about my method is that uncovering the roses doubles as mulching the roses for the spring. Yes, I have to haul off about half of the leaves (which I do indeed lift off as a unit of sliced bag and dump in my wheelbarrow) but I have two neighbors who welcome them as free mulch for their vegetable beds in the spring. For me, if I bring the spring alfalfa and once-yearly fertilizer dose with me as I uncover the roses, every spring chore except for pruning gets done in one fell swoop. I like being a lazy gardener when I can be. And yes, I consider this covering lazy. Once I've collected all the leaf bags (most of the month of November, a slow gardening month anyway), I can cover all 700 in 3 relatively leisurely weekend days. My all-time record speed was two years ago when we literally had 24 hours between 70 degree temperatures and 2 feet of snow that lasted all winter, and I covered all the roses in a day and a half, but I don't recommend that. Frankly, if I had consistent snow cover I don't think I'd cover the roses at all, since nature would insulate them in the easiest way possible and uncover them when the climate was right without any work on my part, but we rarely if ever keep consistent snow cover even long enough to cross-country ski on it. Some time this fall, I'll post pictures if anyone is interested in trying this method, but everyone has their own techniques, and like our own planting formulas some of these are undoubtedly our personal (sometimes mythological I'm sure in my case) beliefs about what roses need, but they're at least derived from what works for us individually. For now, the Grinch poem elsewhere on the roses forum has my technique more or less laid out (if you can read between the rhyming lines). Just my two cents from my experience! Cynthia

Did Blue Girl show other symptoms of RRD? Did the canes that started red turn green? Or did other symptoms arise on that bush? Transmission within a garden seldom has ever happend in that sort a period of time. The vector mite populations don't spike until September in zone 5 conditions (this from the juried scientific literature.) When the rose arrived at your home from Michigan Bulb, was it leafed out, or was it bare of leaves, and had it been dipped in wax? You may not have heard of RRD before this happened. Most people haven't. But you might want to consider that the disease has been to the north of you in Canada, to the south of you in Pennsylvania, in every county in Ohio to the west of you. And so far, I've seen it to the east of you in the BBG in Brooklyn...in the middle of the city. The vector mites are easily carried by winds and fall infections on hybrid teas show most often in new growth the following spring. This I know from my own garden experiences and it fits what others see, as well. There is no way to say where the vector mites came from that infected the rose in your garden that is near your new rose. (And there is no lab test to identify the disease; experienced plant pathologists depend on a collection of symptoms for identification.) There is NO reason to tear up an entire rose bed. As suggested above, remove the sick rose(s). That's what we do when other diseases strike and it works for RRD. Do look upwind of your home for Rosa multiflora. You may find it along stream beds or even growing up into trees. With the disease pressure on roses to the north west and south of your state, RRD is moving into New York, even though it doesn't get talked about. Good luck. Don't panic or make yourself ill about this. I can say this because I've been dealing with RRD in my garden for ten years. I continue to grow roses. I loose a couple of plants each year to RRD. There's RRD in wild roses three miles away. It's become a fact of life, but I can enjoy the ones that live and try to mourn the ones I loose....a lot like life, really. My E-book linked below has twelve chapters about rose rosette as well as a FAQ. It's based on a lot of visiting other gardens with RRD in them as well as a lot of research. The Bibliography at the back is up to date, science wise, if you can stand to read about the intentional spread of RRD to kill multiflora.

alanwrench, I made the same observation as Ox ... I don't see any lignified wood ... and you are running out of time for it to happen. This growth resembles spring not fall growth --- looks to have had too much fertilizer late in the season. IMHO this tree's above ground growth is at risk for this winter. Do a few things ... (1) DO NOT fertilize it any more ... you don't want any further growth (2) after the tree drops its leaves, give it a good coat of WiltPruf (prob a waste of time ... but worth a try ... I use it for my lignified wood and it works great ... but yours are green) and (3) after you wrap it don't be afraid of burying as much as you can; I would wrap it in burlap with the branches drawn together making a cordon; wrap the cordon with WHITE plastic; string a wire fence around tree with a good 18" of free space between the tree and fence; pack the fence tight with leaves; cover the top of the fence with a plastic cap to keep the leaves somewhat dry. More than likely the green branches will not make it ... your next risk is that you lose the young roots and thus the tree. The more you protect the base of the tree the better. -Steve