To me soil is very important, but I agree that you don't have to dig up and amend an entire bed. I was left with a lot of new beds after construction in my yard, but a lot of the area was left full of gravel from the work. There was no way I could remove all of it, so I worked around it. I am amending the rose holes a lot. I did buy bagged soil and other amendments, but I also make my own compost. I do burn most of my yard waste (its a great way to get rid of rose cuttings from pruning). I think add other soil and compost items like weeds and veggie scraps to the ashes and leave for awhile. Of course I have room for this, not everyone does. I just finished harvesting a bunch from last year and putting it around the roses. Another way of doing it is vac/shredding leaves and leaving them in black plastic bags for a year. I just uncovered some from last year and I had the best leaf compost. It looked and felt like chocolate cake. I added it to the other compost that was put around roses. I keep these bags in a spot under the deck where they are not that visible and they shrink down so much, the are really out of sight.

I like to use as much organic amendments and fertilizers that I can. So I get organic soil from HD, composted manure, organic fertilizers, seaweed, fish emulsion, etc. I think it makes a huge difference, especially if you are working with clay and gravel and other stuff that isn't that good for roses. And I just add more each year. The soil is very important, the more I am learning about it.

I really like your idea of just putting the leaves in black bags and letting them sit! So simple!

I live in an area with excellent, deep, rich soil here in the farming areas of rural Michigan. It's dark brown and has a bit of clay, but not too much. Moisture is nicely retained, yet easily penetrating many inches. It is ideal for growing many many plants.

Fortunately for me, the only things I need to do are work the soil so that it's fluffier for baby roots, remove weeds, dig a generous hole, water it, wait, plant, and then water and backfill followed by a three inch mulch later.

I do use our autumn leaf fall as soil enhancer as well.

Our predominate hardwoods in forested regions immediately nearby are sugar, black, and silver maples with bitter nut hickory. Near edges of forest communities, bodies of water, and newly colonized areas feature moisture loving pioneer species like Eastern cottonwood, several willows, quaking aspen, and even the eastern larch. My part of the state is basically a wetland despite our elevation above sea level with a lot of tile and drainage in the area. In historical notes I've read how viciously malaria effected settlers. They were our tornadoes of the Great Plains, if you will.

Other areas are drier, and feature more Oak dominate forests in more xeric sites as they have deeper roots and more fire tolerance. As one journeys North, conifers begin to appear and become more dominate and soil becomes increasingly sandy oftentimes from the extreme glacial action. In fact, our area is still rising since the ice left!

Sorry for the history lesson; I love this state and all it has to offer through nature (actual state management, not so much) as well as our domestic automakers being centralized here. We have a little of everything, but escape the absolute worst most of the time.

Happy gardening! I'm super thankful to be where I am.

Steven

With my clay, it's dig a decent-sized hole, amend generously with old hay, wait several months before planting.

Repeat a thousand times.

I'm not at all sure this is the best way to go, but it's the only way I know. I also mulch, with old hay and whatever organic scraps I can scrape together, and keep a green mulch of little plants in the beds. All pruning scraps not dangerously diseased get chopped up (by hand) and put back in the beds along with pulled and cut weeds and dead plant material from fall cleanup. I don't know whether our land has been this poor in organic material forever, or whether its condition is the result of years--decades--centuries--of farming without anything being put back in. Rebuilding it is a slow, slow business. We also--this was DH's simple and brilliant idea--sow clover or alfalfa in all bare spots in the paths or larger areas where we're not currently planting. Plowing and other drastic earth-moving operations, by the way, aren't an option, as the land is steep and at risk of landslides.

Steven, I enjoyed your comments about where you live. I love where I live, too, and observing the native plant communities that grow locally.

Thank you for sharing your methods everyone! Yes... I have done the easier method of mulch, wait, mulch, wait with great results too. It's tried and true.

I just want something a little faster this time around. ;)

I'm with you Cori Ann. We're doing individual hole amendment, the lasagna method of layering on soil amendments, composting, and my husband did buy a broad fork. He really likes it. I had him fork a couple of areas I plan to plant roses and he put humic acid down the holes it made. One of the soil experts at the "Extension" Scott Goode really recomended the broad fork. My husband is also doing cover crops in some areas.

It's nice to hear you're doing the same soil strategy Sheila! Thank you for the info on the broad fork! I'm still hesitating on it. I'm just using a pitchfork first in the individual holes.

How much of a workout is the broad fork? I'm tall and fit, but not particularly heavy (not super light right now either)... and I was concerned I may not have the body weight leverage. If my hubby ends up having to do it... that wouldn't particularly make for a happy weekend. Gardening isn't as much of a stress reliever for him as it is for me. ;)

This is such a fantastic thread !! so many helpful hints if you are just getting started . I love your composting in the hole idea .. that's great!! I have a trash can of fruit veggie scraps composting and it's filling up fast so I may move some to my holes when I plant my roses even if it's not 100 percent ready! Would have never thought of that .

The trashiest thing I ever did was in pa we were expecting a hard frost when all my roses had buds on them !! So I went out with all our blankets which wasn't enough so I basically emptied out closet and draped clothes all over every Rose to protect them . The next day my neighbor commented on it but who cares ! Lol it looked like I had thrown my husband out of the house and his clothes everywhere ;)

Oh, that is fantastically funny! I can just imagine it: like from a romantic comedy movie or something!

Steven

That is really funny Lily! You know I think using trash bags on the roses would have been even trashier. ;)

And I have done that in the past.

If you end up doing the 'compost in a hole' strategy... make sure you don't actually have the rose planted yet.... just the hole dug. Just in case it attracts critters.

Lily... Here's a quick how-to article that goes into some good do's and dont's for compost-in-a-hole plan. I just wanted to make sure you had some more info just in case you try it. :)

https://dengarden.com/gardening/Compost-Holes-A-Cheap-Easy-Way-to-Enrich-Your-Soil

Cori Ann, you might do fine with standing on the broad fork to get it in. I'd loan it if you were closer. I'm 5-2 125lbs and my husband is 6-5 260 lbs so we can really get it in over here with his help, but you can stand on it. I realize this doesn't sound very good, now, but Cori Ann will know what I mean.

Lol. I do know what you mean. Thank you Sheila.

I have hard as stone compact clay in my yard. Covered with gravel. Everywhere you look. I didn't have energy and patience to build good soil with time being. Just dug a planting hole, during summer it looked like a clay pot inside... amend this clay with some store bought compost, added some conditioner I bought from Ludwig's (containing some wood chips, cotton, lava rocks and sand if I'm not mistaken - dusty stuff). And covered plants with thick layer of compost again and pine needles on the top :) Now if I wanted to move the plant and dig the hole there the soil is almost black and fluffy. Even found some earthworms there... Roses that stayed alive are happy there as I see they started growing from their roots, shooting thick new growth.

But I liked the idea about shredded leaves in black bags a lot. Our neighbor has sisso tree and we get a lot of leaves from it on our yard (sometimes it seems he doesn't get as many as we do). I wonder though how fine leaves shall be shredded? Can I just squeeze them in my hands to break them?

Good job on transforming the soil near your roses! Someone else could probably give better info, but in my experience the type of leaves matter when chopping them up. Oak leaves would need to be chopped really finely. But I have used my neighbor's liquid amber leaves without shredding them and they turned into great compost pretty quickly. I would think it matters on the thickness of the leaf.

I wouldn't use your hands Natasha, but I guess you could. Do you have a leaf blower that also shreds?

We have leaf blower, but it only blows those leaves :) Usually when we are doing that, leaves are almost dry. I guess I'm lucky since those leaves are thin, so I guess I could pile them in a bag, walk on that bag back and forth and come back in a year to check :)

By the way, I found it useful and that's how I get bags of soil and compost from HD now... When shopping find bags that have holes in the package. I pick the ones that have holes but you can see that not that much got loose from there. And HD gives 50% discount for those kind of bags...

I never amend planting hole back-fill. Commercial growers that produce the roses we buy don't either. My roses still grow. Like weeds.

Links to information about modern gardening practices can be found on this page.

https://puyallup.wsu.edu/lcs/

The links to the "myths" series are always helpful embothrium, but I don't necessarily read that as a recommendation to do nothing to soil to get it ready for planting.

Do you mean that you don't break it up with a pitchfork, aerate it, mulch etc? I don't think you mean that... if you do you must already have fantastic soil!

I am very lucky to have great soil, but it is clay. So it needs to be broken up somehow, through green manure, pitchforking, aerating, mulching and waiting, etc...in preparation for planting in order for the plants to really get the benefits from the great soil.

Mulching and waiting is the best, in my opinion, but I'm curious about what other people do... and about other ways that are also good, but a little faster.

So what do you do when you have an area of soil where you want to create a new garden since you don't amend?

Those who want to saved shredded leaves, you can use a blower vac. I use a Toro, it was about $60 new. Make sure you get one with a metal impeller, the plastic ones don't last. I usually rake the leaves in a pile and then stand there and vac/shred them. I'm short and the vac is tall so it's kind of hard for me to walk around with it. Shredding reduces the volume of leaves by 17 times. Most of the leaves I did were oak leaves and the vac/shredder cuts them down to one inch pieces or smaller. Here is a picture of my leaf compost.

Hi Cori Ann - I'm a big proponent of the "mulch and don't wait" school of enriching soil, but I start with decent soil in the first place. It's clay, but loamy clay, so once I can get past the rocks and whatever else was growing instead of roses (like, horrors, a LAWN), I have decent stuff to work with. I do the usual lasagne method over the top of the grass or whatever, since I am wayyyyy too lazy to double dig anything (once at my old house, and never again). When I have a new area I want to turn into a garden, I give myself maybe a day's lead time (but fine if not) to do the following:

- lay down cardboard, paper bags and/or newspapers, and cover with organic stuff like leaves, compost, vegetable trimmings, or whatever - usually 3-5" thick at least

- Add some cheater topsoil to jumpstart the breakdown process - maybe 1"

- top with leaves as top mulch, not necessary to shred if you have something to hold them in place (too much like work) or mulch if you're not cheap like me. A good additional 3" or so of these will break down over the season to enrich the whole bed.

- Go ahead and plant where I jolly well want to. Dig a hole through the lasagne layers into the crappy soil, and mix all of the above into the planting hole, chopping vigorously at the vicious little grubs as you find them (good for the soul as well as soil). I always add some extra manure and compost as well as alfalfa when I plant (even in established beds), mixed about 1/3 with the rest regular soil, so this prepares the hole a little extra.

- Let the worms do your work for you, to even out the discrepancy between your Cadillac planting hole and Nova rest of the bed. You don't want to create a huge sink if you have super clay soil, where all the water pools in your good hole and rots your rose, so by conditioning the rest of the soil while you plant you get the best of both worlds. Not having to wait, but not really leaving the rest of the bed on its own either.

- When some of your roses die (as half of them will in zone 5 for me), plant the new rose in a slightly different spot from the old one to expand the Cadillac-ness of the rest of the bed.

- Keep everything mulched with leaves or other organic material indefinitely to keep feeding your soil for a minimum of work, and maximum benefit with minimum wait time. Make those worms WORK for their grub.

I've done this dozens of times in soil that you couldn't get a pitchfork into without serious sweat, and ended up mid-season with soil good enough to flip with a hand tool. The copious amounts of organic material mixed in with some real soil does it for me, and I don't fuss with waiting at all. Of course that's my soil and yours may differ.

Cynthia

I'm going to have to try your technique, Cynthia. I just wish it was possible to get a giant truck-load of organic matter dumped into my garden, lol! but I've gotta stop doing so much digging...

I like your style Cynthia. I have done the lasagne method before with great results, but I usually wait instead of planting through it immediately. I might have to try it your way.

It's hard to remember that half of your roses will die each year in colder regions. You all are amazing, hardy people who garden so well in that type of climate!

In the soil where I'm prepping, it wasn't that bad a few months ago. But I noticed it has become really impacted from all the pounding hard rain we don't usually have here. :( I don't want to work it and impact it more, but it is going to need some serious breaking up once it dries out a little. And a lot organic matter to help it stay a little fluffier.

The only post that didn't make me tired immediately was hoovb's, since she does nothing except mulch. In spite of that, she has an incredibly beautiful garden with thriving roses. We had a huge amount of rain two days ago (4 inches in one day which hasn't happened here since 1940) and as a whole it's been a wonderfully rainy winter and what I'm seeing is that the roses care more about rainfall than anything else. I normally add bagged soil to our decomposed granite but with the one rose I have left to plant (Mlle. de Sombreuil) I may just put it in the native soil and add mulch as an experiment. It's in a 2 gallon pot from the ARE which must be good soil so that will help.

Great to hear Ingrid!

Glad you liked the idea, Cori Ann - it suits the impatient side of me. And Bart, I do the lazy method of collecting bagged leaves every fall to stack around the edges of my rose beds for winter protection, so I coincidentally have more than plenty of organic material to work with in spring when I want it. I don't know if you have a lot of deciduous trees where you are (Europe as I recall), but it sure helps to prepare ahead of time. There are plenty of foolish people within a few blocks of me that very kindly put all their leaves into giant paper bags for the trash to haul away each fall, so on one fall day last year I drove my husband's truck to gather 100+ 4 foot high filled leaf bags within less than a 2 block radius. Took me a few hours to gather and set up in the yard, and I just hauled them away to the "back 40" this weekend on an uncharacteristically warm early March Saturday this weekend, so it's not that much work as I see it.

Cori Ann, I should qualify that around half of my NEW plantings die each year, since I insist on zone pushing and trying new things, and I never know what will survive in my yard till I've tried it a few times. I've had eventual success trying roses in various spots around the yard, so some of the new plantings I know are long shots already. Most roses that have survived one winter robustly will continue to survive, though I have maybe 10-20 established roses in a given year that will fade for reasons I can't figure out. As much as I love planting roses, I couldn't treat them as annuals expecting to replant them every year. The new plantings are experiments in my world, but I'd be a frustrated cold weather rose gardener if I didn't have my tried and true roses that come back without much fussing. As Ingrid says, it would make me too tired under those conditions. Given that roses take 3 years to mature, I'd be putting in that labor for no payoff if I had to baby them and then they never survived long enough to reach decent blooming potential.

Cynthia

O, Cynthia, I so wish that I had a truck! I do that, too: gather up other people's "garden trash" ;here in Italy, the best period for this is in spring, when everybody is doing garden clean-up ,and then later when grass, etc starts growing so fast and people prune and mow. But it's never enough! My poor soil seems to absorb organics like a sponge...