Having been born and raised in California, earthquakes don't bother me much. A few years back we had a family reunion in Kansas and I thought it was pretty funny that the relatives from Kansas were all telling us how scary the earthquakes must be while all us Californians were worrying about tornadoes. I'd take earthquakes, fires and landslides over tornadoes or hurricanes any day! I think that most people are more comfortable with the natural disasters that they grew up with, but everybody has something to worry about, right? California will get a massive tsunami eventually, it's just a matter of time. In fact, there is a chunk of Hawaii that will fall into the ocean someday and trigger a mega tsunami that will threaten the entire West Coast. There is a similar situation with one of the Canary Islands that will someday threaten the entire East Coast. I think you would be hard pressed to find a place anywhere that doesn't have some sort of threat looming over it. That's why it's important to not worry about that sort of thing, just take every day as it comes and enjoy the beauty (and roses) that life brings your way.

Right, don't fertilize until they have recovered and have put out plenty of leaves. Bloom Buster is the wrong kind of fertilizer--regular Miracle Gro or Miracle Gro for Roses is fine, or any reasonably balanced fertilizer such as 10-10-10 or 18-6-12. Watering correctly is the most important thing. Keep a 2" mulch of leaves or bark around the roses. When the soil under the mulch feels dry-ish, water thoroughly with 2-3 gallons for small plants or 5 gallons for larger, plus or minus for extremely hot or very mild, cloudy weather. Usually once a week is fine. For new plants, I divide the ration in half and water twice a week.

K2laser, I live in South Carolina and we have the hot humid summers, not as long as you, but we sure get hot during the summer and the humidity is so thick you can hardly breathe. There are some hybrid teas that are very black spot resistant, I would research that onine and ask in this forum for some names of some of them. You really can't ever get rid of black spot on a rose. You can spray all kinds of expensive sprays dilligently on the rose bush and canes, constantly keep the rose bush real clean, don't let the infected leaves blow into other roses, and they will always have it. I bought for the first time this spring a knock out rose, double red. It is the only rose in my garden that doesn't have black spot. It is absolutley gorgeous! Clean foliage, and grows fast. When I get tired of all the nonsense for my hybrid tea rose trees and black spot, I will buy another knock out. All you ahve to do is water them, don't even dead head them. Low maintance, it is a beautiful thing.

I think Kate misunderstood me. The public looked at me as BAD, NOT you. This happened 15 years ago when I was spraying my roses with chemicals. A neighbor walked to me and said, "why do you even bother growing roses with all these spraying?" It's even worse now, like the protest of bee keepers in France against Bayer. My observations do not apply to anyone else, since it's different with them. If I live in a hot area, I would pile up the bark mulch. But I live in a wet area - where it's more conductive to fungi growth. My defense is with the OGR and the fragrant Austins. These get the bad rap of black-spot prone, poor disease resistance - and less people bother to grow them. I did not want to buy Radio Times and Wise Portia because of the bad reports about their poor disease resistance. They were the only ones available, so I had no choice. Now both I and the bees enjoy these. I have never seen any bees on Knock-outs. We tend to reject certain roses as being disease prone, rather than seeing what we can do to protect them. The fault lies in us, and not in the roses. How did these old fragrant rose flourish in the old days without chemicals? Chemicals get the bad rap. Roses get the bad rap as NEEDING chemicals. Then Knock-outs take over the land. I'm trying to find a way to break this cycle, making roses to be more environmentally friendly. Lainey2: you don't have to dig down to get to the bottom. It's a big pile higher than a house. Actually it's easier to get the bottom, most aged stuff, since it's at your height. You would have to climb up a big mountain to get the fresh manure on top.