How to Care for Flower Carpet Roses in the Spring

Hi, I’m David Epstein, this is Growing Wisdom and today we’re going to talk about caring for your flower carpet roses in the spring. And of course, a lot of carpet roses are the care free rose so that means, not much care even in the spring. But there's still a few things you need to do in order to keep them as healthy as they possibly can be. You want those blooms going all the way from late spring through until frost and here's how to do it.

There are really three things you want to do in early spring to your flower carpet roses. Clean, cut and feed. The cleaning part involves just taking away any of the leaves that have fallen of the plant or come from around your yard and get the area underneath the rose all nice and neat. The reason we’re cleaning up underneath the roses, one, it looks better and two, if there are any disease pores, we want to get rid of them.

The great thing about flower carpet roses, they’re just not susceptible to many other rose diseases however, we’re not going to chance it, so we’re going to clean up the area. Number two, we’re going to cut and this is the great part. You don’t have to be that precise about where you cut. You don’t have to use the pruners, you can actually use sheers, the rose isn’t going to know the difference.

If you look at your flower carpet rose and you’re ready to prune and you think it might be dead, just give it a little scratch test. You’re fingernail on the bark, you’ll see some green underneath where it’s green, and it’s still alive and guess what? You’re going to get leaves and eventually flowers.

So when it’s time to cut, you want to take off about 2/3 of the plant. If your plant is 12 inches high, take off 8 inches. If your plant is 24 inches, take off 16. One last point, let’s say you live somewhere where it’s fairly mild and your roses have already to started to leaf out for the year, you can still cut them back. Don’t worry about it. You can cut them back when they’re dormant like this or when they have some new leaves out. It’s not a problem.

Our goal is to get the plants to be nice and bushy and full of blossoms. So it really doesn’t matter if they’ve started to leaf out just a little bit. The last thing you want to do is feed the roses. You’ll do this twice during the course of the year. Once now in early spring and once during the middle part of the summer. You could use a time release rose or there’s any release fertilizer will work. That’s the key, slow release so it feeds it over a longer period of time.

Finally it doesn’t matter where you live; it’s always a good idea to put down on a little bit of molt around your roses that will help keep the weeds down and the moisture in. And that’s it, you’re done. It’s time to just sit back and enjoy the flower carpet roses once they bloom. They’re not going to stop until it gets real cold.

Flower carpet roses, the carefree rose, super easy. I love to having them in my garden. Come back every week for all our tips and some helps here at Growing Wisdom.