Bart Bart, I have continued to water my pots. I feel like everything in the ground is on its own .

For me it's been a challenge to know what to do

too. We have had a lot of wind and freezing nights. The pots were frozen so I gave them a drink to thaw them out. I would rather have snow.

Anyway, everything is looking good with the beginnings of life

Since you see your roses waking up I would think that a nice

drink would be in order.

Best wishes Bart Bart

I would also give them a drink. In the winter I catch rainwater and anything under cover, be it eaves or huge evergreen branches gets water whenever my containers are all full.

Both in ground and pots get water, I figure better for them to be hydrated to deal with fluctuating temps than dry

And for a different approach in a location quite proximate to Kristine's, I water nothing outside in winter that is exposed to the elements, even my containerized plants. They all fend for themselves and subsist only on what nature provides.

But having said that, I don't suggest that mine is the path to follow :-)) Climate, local weather and one's specific soil conditions are what will drive a need for winter irrigation and those will be unique to each garden. Experienced gardeners will know what's required but if a lack of precipitation is a concern, a periodic deep soak will not hurt if drainage is good. As we hope it should be :-)

btw, this situation is not unique to roses but appropriate with any woody based tree or shrub.

Two things to do:

One: keep a rain gauge for your garden.

Two: Keep a record of sunshine + wind

For example, I know that last month my property got 5.9 inches of rain. We had about five days of brigth sunlight with no winds.

The rest of the time was overcast and cooler, and the ground water didn't evaporate. The evaporation is important,. Some of my freeze damages from November are showing new leaves, that December and January rain did that even with the cold,

The bad thing was that a lot of plants weren't expecting really cold temperatures (5F) while they were still growing and in a month or two I'll know if they are coming back from the roots.

Lots of sunshine and wind makes 'live' plants, that is plants that are doing things that they do when life is lowing through them, need more water, regardless of the season.

And then there are/were my herb plants whose roots drowned in two wet weeks last summer when the previous three years had let them thrive regardless.,

I agree - after 3 weeks of no rain, especially if it is likely to freeze, I water my potted plants.

Jackie

Thank you all so much-this is helpful.

I'm not thinking about my potted roses-they are here at the house,on our terrace,and during the winter get basically no real sun. I water them in a very irregular manner,but don't worry about them, since they are so easy to keep an eye on.

It's the ones out at my land that concern me; I think catspa really hit the nail on the head. So next week ought to be about 3 weeks of no rain ( at least according to what I marked on my calender. I seem to remember it may haved rained properly on the 27th ,too, but I didn't mark it down ...). The temperatures are supposed to be above normal then; i'll check the soil around the new implants today...

I take the water to the plants which need it. It is usually pretty obvious, even in winter, although I am generally with Jacqueline, inasmuch as I pretty much ignore all pots with plants in dormancy, only splashing water on the evergreens or those in active growth...and only when obviously needing it. Nearly all of my home garden is containerised...and requires ALL of my watering energy. Anything in the ground, at any time of the year apart from it's first season, is on it's own.

I have many seedlings growing in the greenhouse and garden, so watering is probably themost relentless, and often onerous task. Plants in pots, denied the option of questing roots, are always in need of a whole lot more care and effort than those growing 'in the wild'.

I also have 2 far places where I garden - my allotment and my wood. I can water at the allotment...and do, especially vegetables, but there is no irrigation available in the wood so I can only ever plant in autumn and hope for the best. Some plants die...many more thrive...but these are the conditions available so I do what I can, suffer the losses and learn a lot. I certainly learned the insanity of growing the wrong plants in the wrong place, back when I though I was 'in charge' and imagined I could bend nature to my will if I just put in a bit more extra effort ( as if ).

How do you manage at your land, Bart? Sounds a bit like mine - water being the main issue...but also predation by deer, rabbits, squirrels etc, shade from trees. Roses, I have to say, were an early casualty although I have managed to grow a few of the more vigorous ramblers (Paul's Himalayan musk, Rambling Rector, Pleine de Grace,r.soulingeana and arvensis...along with eglantine and dogrose...but is is far from the woodland rosy fantasy I entertained back in 2012.

Rosa rubiginosa (eglantine) and R. canina are naturalized here along the coast and I have R. arvensis growing in the "wild" woody area of my yard (no regular irrigation, but sometimes a bit for R. arvenisis). So, I'm not surprised they took to your woodland, @rosaprimula. I'm also having a try at getting 'Mel's Heritage' and 'Alba Odorata' going in the same general area (the latter had to be removed from a previous site, though glorious and gorgeous and insanely vigorous, to keep it from assaulting and potentially maiming a neighbor -- the neighbor where it's at now is of less concern...). They seem vigorous and "wild" enough to probably succeed.

The general rule here when establishing natives, or a plant that's meant to grow as a native, is irrigation as needed the first year (plant in the fall, always) and, after that, zero. If a plant can't get its roots out into the ground well enough to meet its needs in that first year, then it just isn't meant to be at that location, and summer irrigation of natives here often creates problems, like honey root fungus. Nothing more tedious, though, than a native plant restoration project in a low-rain year -- so much more work than a reasonable rain year, having to keep those root-balls from drying out.

Thank you all once again. Rosaprimula, way back when I started, I had terrible problems with this feral shepard family,and was obliged to fence off the garden area of my land to keep the sheep out. Since then, thank Heaven, this family has either moved away or else the more aggressively criminal elements have died off-a huge relief (the sheep and goats were bad enough, but I was truly scared of the men, too!!!). But because of this situation I began fencing stuff off years ago, and by now I have quite a large space that is relatively protected. The Badger Invasion that took place about 8-10 years back required that I re-inforce my fence all along the perimeter at the bottom to keep them from digging under it-this took me about 2 years to complete. I'm still trying to catch up on jobs that had to be put off due to that project. The sharp slope of my land is a help in keeping deer out. Fighting off invaders has always been a big issue for me.

" The general rule here when establishing natives, or a plant that's meant to grow as a native, is irrigation as needed the first year (plant in the fall, always) and, after that, zero. If a plant can't get its roots out into the ground well enough to meet its needs in that first year, then it just isn't meant to be at that location " Catspa, I wholly agree with you, and know that in the long run this is going to be the rule for my garden. Wild roses and other members of the rosacee family grow all ove my land, and so far climbers ,ramblers and some OGRs so far are doing well. However, recently our summers have become so awful that I am thinking of trying to keep up with watering some of the newer implants for longer than the first year. I am also trying some floribundas, but if it turns out that these can't eventually adapt to little if any "artificial" irrigation,they are out.

water a plant when it needs water ... what difference does he calender make?

if its feb in MI.. and the pot if frozen solid.. dont water it.. dont you think ...

a dormant plant needs very little water ... perhaps just enough that the peat media isnt sucking moisture out of dormant roots ...

if you live where your plants never go dormant.. why would you ever not water them properly??

ken

Here in the Bay Area of California, I water everything - roses, natives, and other kinds of ornamentals - if it goes three weeks without rain. Tea roses for example were bred for Mediterranean climates and are busy blooming this time of year. Most plants don't go truly dormant in the winter here, even roses that do go dormant in other climates. For natives and other Mediterranean plants, this is the active season. If we don't get rain, they still need water.

As for newly planted anything, I would shorten that to two weeks. If we get a warm sunny period, I might even shorten that, since water evaporates faster when it is warm.

I just noticed this.

Here in SoCal, our conditions are much like yours. We were blessed with some rain this year, and while that lasted, we were able to turn off all of the outdoor watering systems. But our rainy season seems to be almost over . . . about 2 months early . . . and there will be no more rain here for the next year.

Someone asked why would we NOT water?

For us, the answer is that the supply of water is not infinite. One of these days (hopefully, after I'm dead) Landscape watering in SoCal will very likely be illegal. Indeed, we have cut back by 20%, and sacrificed roses. Dishwater goes into the garden. (If my Great Grandmother could do it, so can I.)

Meanwhile, I rejoice at every bloom, for as long as I have them.

Thank you so much,Jeri. It's one thing if you only have to pull out the hose and turn on the faucet in order to water; it's quite another if you have to bring in water yourself in a tank in the car, etc. as I have to do once my rain harvest water is gone. Not to mention the fact that in a climate like this, it's essential that plants "learn" to fend for themselves, as catspa mentioned. And, if the temperatures are below 0 Celsius at night, it doesn't seem very wise to soak the soil and then risk having it freeze the area around the roots into a solid block.

In one area, the soil under the mulch seems downright wet still; in others, it's moist. I'm planning to water next week, when the temperatures are due to go up and stay above freezing.

@bart bart That's interesting, we had a cold snap in my area in December, about 48 hours of temps 0°F at the high at -18°F at the low (excuse my ignorance of what that translates to in °C) and the rose nursery owner here advised me to water the roses well before the cold snap came.

I also was under the impression plants handled a freeze better if they were well watered prior

The logic behind going into a hard freeze with well-watered plants is that if the root ball can freeze, 0°C/32°F, the temperature of ice, is about as much cold as the plant's roots will be exposed to. For roses, at least, this is not so bad. But, without enough water/moisture, the rootball doesn't freeze and thus is exposed to whatever the ambient cold is, which, in a hard freeze, could be much lower than 0°C/32°F and cause damage. Same logic for running sprinklers over orange trees to encase them in ice, which is what growers try to do here in a hard freeze; oranges can take 0°C/32°F but are damaged if temps go too much lower than that.

Your plan @bart bart is more or less what I do during a bad drought, when water restrictions are in place, which is just give roses enough to keep them alive and kind of in a semi-dormant state, though certainly not actively growing or blooming. That at least some of them can survive such a regime is evidenced by the roses found in pioneer cemeteries here that have no summer irrigation. The Sierra mountains and their foothills may get at least a few thunderstorms in summer, like the Mediterranean climates of Europe, and some of our coastal areas, while not having rain, have fog and drizzle in summer, so pioneer cemeteries in these locations are more likely to have tough old surviving roses. In the more inland, lower elevation parts of California like where I am, there is zero rain from May to October, or longer, so finding such survivors is less likely, but there are still some, even so. The extreme length of the dry season here (longest and driest of any Mediterranean climate) explains why the perennial grasses native to Europe that cattle ranchers tried to introduce to these ranges to provide summer forage never naturalized and, other than in our coastal areas, are found only in and around creeks -- without at least a thunderstorm or two, they can't make it through that long dry patch.

It's so sad because here in Tuscany the climate is just so obviously getting worse-it seems every year it's drier and hotter for longer periods! We did get some decent rain,but now that this dam' high-pressure front from Africa has invaded for the umpteenth time,I feel all paranoid again. I wonder if my garden will have a future or not...

I started watering yesterday -only got five of my 40-some new implants (all but about 13 of which are roses) done,using up the rain water that is collected in various barrels. It's hard work lugging buckets of water around,but it'll just evaporate if I don't use it, so I start like this-do a few every time I go out there. Hopefully my pessimistic attitude will be unjustified and put to shame by a glorious change of pace in the weather tendencies.

One thing, Bart . . . A large % of the roses we grow here are foundlings that survived in deserted gardens, un-watered cemeteries and the like. I think we're fortunate in having taken that direction because I think these are roses that can best survive serious drought.

Sort of a case of Survival Of The Fittest.

It was strange to find myself doin a "mass watering" on a chilly February afternoon. It took me about 2 hours to do the new implants (most of them), plus some second-and-plus year-olds that need encouragement. At this point it's been a month since they got rain, but I couldn't go before, due to a bad intestinal virus.

In the meantime, I took the plunge-I saw a drip-irrigation kit on Amazon that is made for low water pressure/gravity based water sources and bought it. It's going to take a while to figure out-I don't know the names of all the hoo-jiggies that are involved in connecting up hoses,so I definitely need the illustrations of the instruction pamphlet included. I can see that it's going to be a bit complex to adapt everything to my existing tanks; for one thing, the screw-on ends of these sorts of hoo-jiggies seem to be frustratingly non-universal. But it's a start, and from what I've done so far in un-ravelling this complicated (for me) set-up,I think I can probably figure out a way to adapt it. Hopefully, if I manage to figure this one out and make it work,in the future I will become more competent with this sort of thing.

Jeri , you are so right that the bottom line is "survival of the fittest". But as I mentioned in other posts (perhaps on other threads) I DID lose several years of "real" gardening work due to my anti-badger fencing project and ill health,so I'm sort of behind with soil improvement, etc,and the worsening climate makes it all the more difficult. So I feel it's too soon to come to certain conclusions...

I live in Richmond, Ca and have been surprised at how cold the nights have been. I remember a phone conversation I had with a freind where I said

"I'm so cold today".

"How cold is it? she asked me.

"50 degrees F. "

"Above or below zero?"

Silly of me to complain of being cold in California when I'm speaking to someone who lives in the mountains of Alaska.

I usually don't water my Tea rosebushes until August, and then only once or twice a month, then once again in September. if they appear to need it. They are all of a mature size.

Lux.

Around here, we are also always told to make sure the garden is well watered before a cold snap. Right now we are in the middle of a very cold (for us) storm system, but thankfully it is also raining a lot (when it is not hailing, which it did last night). I think catspa's explanation above is correct - I have been hearing that most of my life, and it does seem to protect the plants during our very rare freezing times.

bart bart - I hope you are able to install that drip irrigation system - just reading about you hauling buckets of water all over made my back hurt. Good luck!

Jackie

How much does it cost to drill a water well in Italy? It's tough without water source on that land. You could get a few large containers to collect rainwater.