Louis, if you do not own the home you live in, I would recommend keeping them in large pots so you can easily move them with you. Just a thought. We are only trying to help you avoid wasting your hard earned money on a plant that could be disappointing, will die, or worse yet, infect your other roses. The Own-Root question: "Body bag" roses are generally roses that are grafted onto the root stock of a faster growing rose. This makes them grow faster in a shorter period of time. That's fine, unless the rose dies back and the root stock grows up instead. Then you are stuck with a very fast growing rootstock that will most likely disappoint you with climbing limbs and only one bloom in the spring. Own-root roses won't do that to you. That's just the tip of the iceberg--I am sure others can tell you their main reasons for own root preference. But some people don't really care much about own-root vs. grafted. I prefer own root, but it won't stop me from getting a grafted rose if the conditions are right. However, my 100-year-old house used to have a whole row of "Dr. Huey" (a common root stock) roses growing along the fence, and I guarantee you that at one time, every one of those Dr. Hueys was growing as something else. Trust me--we were all once newbies to roses. I used to buy the $5 plants in bags because it seemed economical at the time--but more often than not I was disappointed in the results and/or lost the rose. My husband always tells me that "We don't have the money to buy cheap s@!t." What he means is that when you buy junk, you have to keep spending money to replace the junk and eventually, you've spent a fortune on junk. But if you invest in a good, long-lasting product just once, you spend less money and have better results. I recommend that you invest a bit more money in fewer plants. That's just my two cents. Honestly, it sounds like you have a list of excuses to not listen to the advice. *shrugs* Think outside the box and consider other options rather than shooting them down. We're only trying to help.

Here in Montreal, over the last year, there has been a seachange from disposable to reusable bags in grocery stores. One store started providing high quality cloth (or plastic-impregnated strong paper) reusable bags for a dollar. The bags were so gosh-darned useful that people started buying them and using them not just for groceries, but for carrying stuff all over the place, advertising the name of the store as they went. The other stores quickly got involved, and started competing to make more and more attractive ones, so it was their bag that was being carried, not the competition. The plastic bags are still available for people that want them, but carrying one makes you a pariah on the street. This time last year, you would see hundreds of those bags stuck in trees and streetlights, breaking down in alleys and filling trash cans. Not any more - the combination of real utility (the bags are actually very good - I use them to carry things to work, for luggage, in the garden, lugging tools in my workshop, and for storage when homebrewing), low cost (the bags are printed with the store's name, so it's free advertising) and social stigma seems to have corrected this problem in a very big way. One unexpected problem that has arisen is that I used to use those plastic bags as trash bags. Now, I find myself buying real plastic trash bags, which is a habit I have to break.

They took out our Albertson's and replace it with a Western Family store. Now we have 2 WF stores, a Wally World, and a Smith's. I mutter under my breath every time I have to go into WM, I'm not keen on Smith's, it's way too crowded, and the only reason I still go to the old Albertson's, now WF, is for the employees I've gotten to know and who know me by name. If I had my druthers, I'd drive a "fur piece" and do my shopping at the only Albertson's available in my area, but 2 hours is a loooong drive for groceries. The only reason I set foot in WM is dog food, it is cheaper by far than all of the other stores. If I find it on sale somewhere else, I stock up so I don't have to go to WM!! Our local WM has finally taken out all those center aisle kiosks that bottlenecked traffic. They were such a pain. It got to the point I would park my buggy, walk to where I needed to go and pick up product and walk back to my buggy and then check out. I swear they rearrange the store at night and move the shelves closer together so you can't pass 2 shopping carts side by side. And don't even get me started on the shoppers who leave their buggies in the MIDDLE of the aisle and disappear, or block the entire aisle while they talk to someone they just saw. Sorry, ranting got out of hand, what was the question again?

One of the reasons that Whole Dog Journal will not put a dog food on their "approved" list without the manufacturer freely giving out the name of the manufacturing plant when asked by a legitimate inquiry is that such full disclosure helps guard against the kind of accident that occurred in 2007. Many of the small dog food companies have their foods made at plants that manufacture for many different companies. Knowing that the precise ingredients that the individual manufacturer specified for their food were used in the manufacture of it is part of the trust that small companies must have in these "batch" manufacturing plants. At least one pet food plant used ingredients not specified by the pet food manufacturers whose food they were making, according to Wikipedia's article on Protein Adulteration in China Having the name of the plant that manufactures your food easy to look up in case of a food contamination event allows consumers to decide whether to buy other foods made at that plant. Given all of that work that WDJ does to get this info for us, it is pretty obvious that the plants that are making these foods are right here in the US and Canada. The protein supplement that was imported from China was criminally poisoned with the addition of melamine plastic in 2006 and 2007 and there is evidence that there was a similar outbreak in 2005 (see the Wikipedia link below). Chinese companies who participated in this in 2006 and 2007 that poisoned our pets were not immediately sanctioned, and the milk industry went on to commit horrific poisoning of baby formula and milk products in China that was not discovered until May 2008 and not made public until August or September. Milk products from China shipped all over the world were found to have melamine in them even into 2009. From Wikipedia: "Two people were executed, one given a suspended death penalty, three people receiving life imprisonment, two receiving 15-year jail terms,[6] and seven local government officials, as well as the Director of the Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), being fired or forced to resign. Yes, all that had to do with the poisoning of babies and others who drank the milk in China. It only came to light because a New Zealand affiliate of the Chinese milk company kept insisting that something was wrong and had to be investigated. Melamine can be manufactured from urea (a concentrated part of urine), coal, and other sources. Urea and other nitrogen sources are added to the feed of ruminants (multi-stomach animals, animals who chew a cud) to increase the nitrogen level because they can get protein's nutrition from these non-food sources due to their unique digestive processes. THAT is how melamine started being put into food - the waste from making it was used in cattle feed. when it was made from urea. A crude way to measure how much protein is in a food is to measure the nitrogen level. Melamine, urea, and some other non-foods increase the nitrogen level without adding to the nutritional level (except for ruminant feed). So now, they have to use more sophisticated testing methods to test foods for animals and people. Because people cannot be trusted, in capitalist or socialist countries, not to poison each other for profit or to make their expected output! This all goes back to my sneaking feeling that this planet can only healthily sustain a very tiny fraction of the people we have living here. If we can't eat whole foods, or feed whole foods to our meat livestock and pets, then we are going to have this kind of thing happen. I have been discussing the need to change our diets to "no processed foods" with my fellow chronically ill friends online. Most of us had no children. It is turning out that this is a good thing.