My gardens are all drip irrigated, and it's the best thing I did while planning them! My supplies came from Dripworks, who have great customer service and design assistance. Unfortunately, no one but you can answer your question. It all depends on the roses, the weather, your soil, your emitters, your water pressure ... I could go on and on. For some sort of guidelines, let's use my front hybrid tea bed as an example. I have clay loam soil, mulched beds, half-inch supply lines, and one adjustable Shrubbler emitter on each of the 80 roses in that garden. I don't know exactly how much water each of them gets, but running the system for 2 hours whenever it's been dry seems to be enough. I use a simple manual rotary timer on the hose to shut off the water after 2 hours. All of my lines run on top of the ground, but below the mulch. The only part of the system that's visible are the emitters. Hope this helps, Connie

What kind of soils do you have and how large are your roses? Even my enormous climbers are fine being watered twice a week for 20 minutes in sandy loam. We water for the plants that need the least water and use multiple emitters for the plants that need more water. So if most of your garden would be fine with 15 minutes 3 days a week, you can put two emitters on a big climber you want to have more water (tho I find climbers have massive root systems and are fine with the regular schedule, so that's a bad example). Newly planted plants need to be watered three or four times a week with less water until they are established. You can literally see them transform when they are ready to switch down to a regular schedule. One thing you cannot do with low flow irrigation is give your roses a good deep soaking before fertilizing them in the summer. Also- you really do need to check that you aren't drowning individual plants or producing runoff once you settle on a schedule. Three times a week is a lot of watering. Tests have shown that people are far worse at gauging whether their plants need water than scientific measurements based on evapotranspiration rates and season, even without soil moisture tests. What I'm saying is that it's easy and very normal to overwater.

I fought this for years and here is where it lead me. Using synthetics can and will produce more as well as more dependable results 100% of the time IF you know exactly what you are doing. That means if you don't hold a degree in the field,it will be hit and miss even asking questions of people who hold the degrees and know exactly what they are doing. Problem is the expert must see and touch the plant,know history of soil&run fingers through it and know precisly what has been done including but not limited to,daily weather,amts & timing of water and nutrents up to that point. Organic is the way to go for even for the most dedicated gardeners. Organic is more forgiving of neglect and mistakes eventhough the mistakes and neglect will reduce production,it's not intolerable amounts. Non-organic mistakes often result in drastic results up to and including 100% loss. An often incountered one is where fertilizer is applied then miscalculation of weather and/or moisture occurs. Another is where insectiside is used to rid a pest that is effecting a plant by eating leaves or sucking some juice but not killing it nor ruining all fruit. Benificials on neighboring plant is eradicated and a pest that was being kept in check or shows up suddenly mushrons and ruins one or more crops. Very few things you do organicly will result in such sweeping results,good or bad. The soil should always be in transition for the lack of a better term. This addresses fertilize applications. In any container or plot , I try to insure there are diverse types and stages of finished compost. That insures that as micros are consumed replacements are being produced. I believe far too much gravity is afforded N being tied up by deterioating matter. Dumping a lot of fresh material like saw dust with huge amounts of exposed surface will definitly starve plants until rate of decomposition slows. A case where there is negitive results but usualy recovers enough to produce a fair to poor crop. Turning under green cover like vetch can realy supply season long crop fuel. I just cannot stress enough how important it is to understand your plants and that will happen with experience and experience will come sooner by asking inteligent questions of those willing to help. In an effort of convincing sceptics that it is possiable to read plants,I offer some off topic evidence. Try this out if you know a rancher,not nessarly an old crusty one, a cowperson in their 20s is quite capiable. Drive him/her to a herd they have never been around and without leaving the seat of the vehicle they can tell you; very near the age,the sex,weight and breed/mixture of breed for each animal while average person is deciding what color they are. If alowed to walk near them (many cattle dislike and will run away from strangers) closly estimate stage of pregnancy while our novice wonders why the one giving birth within a week is not fat as the one who has 3 months to go. Think about human faces. Isn't it amazing that we can differinate all of them. Practice!

Thanks Mike, I am asking mainly on a schedule because I will be leaving from may 18th - july 7th. Any other time I will probably cap the irrigation tubes and just use the hose since like you said I can just monitor better that way, or atleast until I feel the trees are healthy again. Another issue is that my drip lines are all hooked up to the same line which connect to bells of fire plans, palm trees, and the citrus trees. I just talked to the nursery where I got the plants from and they said while I'm gone it would be fine to water my tree every 3 days on a drip with about 20 gallons worth of water? After I get back I can go back to monitoring it. So if I mulch, could I drip 20 gallons every 3 days?