AngelsGarden's Blog

I haven't had roses since we moved to this house about 5 years ago.  This is the story of how I came to have some awhile back. 

My husband and his father own a "fix it upper" house that we have been working on, off and on since last spring.  We were over there many times last year and never saw any roses at the end of the driveway.  Our brother in law was mowing the yard regularly evidently cutting them down.

About 6 weeks ago my husband and I went over there to do some work for a few hrs.  Lo and behold there at the end of the driveway were some roses!  Weren't there last year!  No one lives there and the neighbors most certainly are not going to be generous in that way.  We looked at them for a while pondering how they could have survived all of last summer being continually being cut down.  We decided that they must be REALLY hardy and maybe we could take the chance and move them.  We dug them and put them into a couple of buckets, weeds, grass and all.  We brought them home and put them in the back yard in the shade where they sat for almost 2 weeks due to the fact that my husband had taken my shovels somewhere and I didn't get them back for awhile.

We decided that we should plant these roses where the azalea was in the front flower bed.  Which meant we had to dig up the azalea.  My husband a.k.a Big Daddy dug and cut the roots out a good ways from the base and it came out in one very big piece.  We talked about where we could plant it in our yard but decided that it wouldn't look good in any of those places.  BD though that it would be funny to take it over to his parents house and plant it near the end of their driveway and not tell them, see how long it took them to notice it.  It was dark by then so we loaded it in the back of the truck, that was NOT EASY, that thing was heavy!  Then he went and planted it, mulched it and came back home.  It did take them a few days to notice. LOL Its still looking good!

The next day we prepared the soil with fertilizer, extra soil, composted manure and chopped banana peels.  We tried to "weed" the clumps of very wet soil that was around the roses but all of the soil just fell off of the roots.  We planted about 8 pieces that had roots on them.  Some of them had a few stems on them, some had only 1.  All of them had browning on the leaves and a few had fallen off.  I didn't know if they would make it with all of the roots being disturbed and planting them in such hot weather.  We have had a good amount of rain since then and if we didn't, I watered.

A couple of days ago I was checking them out and all of them (except 2 stems) has new growth!!!  These must surely be the roses for me.  I don't even know what color they are since they had already bloomed when we found them but I'm sure that we will love them.  I have a glimmer of hope that with our long growing season maybe we will see a bloom or 2 before winter arrives.