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There are only a few weeks left before Valentine’s Day and nothing can beat the roses that you have planted yourself, especially for this occasion. To help you along the way, we have created a handy dandy guide that will give you step-by-step instructions on how to plant roses to get the best results.

Preparing your Garden

To get the most out of your plant you need to start from the ground up (lol) you must make sure you have good-quality soil. For the most part, roses prefer soil that has loamy soil. We would recommend our Wessex® Blended 10mm Loam Topsoil and Borders & Beds Topsoil for the best results as they are both designed specifically to nourish and aid plants and flowers to grow as healthily as possible.
To ensure that your soil conditions are as habitable for the roses as possible, you can also get your hands on an inexpensive pH testing kit to find out the pH levels of your soil. This will come in handy because roses thrive in soil that ranges from neutral to acidic soil, meaning pH levels of around 6.5 will be ideal. Please remember that acidic soils – those at a 7 or below pH level- will also need Garden Lime to retain balance. On the other hand, alkaline soil will need to be improved with materials such as wood chips.

Now that your soil is in optimal condition, we can now work with the plant itself. Hopefully, you will have Bare Root Roses. They might look intimidating if you’ve never worked with them before however, they are very easy to manage if you take your time and are patient.

The first thing you need to do with the bare roots is to check their condition. You need to ensure that the roots are not dry and that the weather is not frosty. You are not required to pack the roses away if the weather persists for around 7 days, but any longer than that we suggest packing them up with some wet compost to ensure they don’t get destroyed. Do not panic too much, if the roots look too dry, all you have to is submerge them in a bucket of water for a couple of hours.

Planting Your Roses

1. Choose the best spot for your roses to be planted in. Ideally somewhere that will get around 6 hours of sunlight. To make the optimum plant bed, make sure to dig down to around 3 feet in depth. If you are planting more than one make sure to keep each plant around 3 feet apart from the other so nothing gets tangled
2. Get yourself a garden spade and dig a hole deep enough to fit the roots plus even more – make sure there’s enough space as otherwise, it may hinder your rose’s growth.
3. Use a garden pruner, shear away the dead bits off the roots, and ensure the healthy part is 8 inches long.
4. Install the plant in the space you dug up and fill in all the empty and surrounding areas with soil. Once that’s done place around 3 inches of mulch surrounding the base of the bush.
5. Water the plants from below so you don’t get the leaves damp. Wet leaves can cause fungus problems. You will have around 2 inches of water a week to nourish the plants but it won’t be as important when it’s raining.

Maintaining Your Roses

1. Once you have followed your steps, you should see flowers grown in around 4 weeks’ time (just in time for Valentine’s Day). The following steps are important if you wish to maintain your rose plant for many years to come.
2. The rose plants need to be fertilised 3 times a year, in spring, midsummer and just before autumn.
3. As we have mentioned earlier, it’s always best practice to use garden sheers and chop off any branches that are too thin or dead. Make sure to leave at least 5 healthy branches to keep the plant going.
4. Finally, make sure to keep an eye out for insects on your roses, and if an infestation does happen, you can treat it with insecticide.

If you follow all our steps carefully, you will have homegrown red roses for Valentine’s day for many years to come.

Impress your partner with home-grown red roses!