Preparing Flowers For Wintering, Sheltering Roses For The Winter

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Help the flowers overwinter

Hiding flowers

If you look closely at some summer cottages and garden plots, you will definitely notice that quite a few of the owners of the plots leave flower beds unattended at the end of the season, dooming them to obvious death.

But there are many simple techniques that help preserve almost all flowers in the winter. And then they will start to delight the owners from the very early spring. I want to give beginner gardeners some useful, in my opinion, recommendations. They are based on my many years of experience and the experience of many of my neighbors and acquaintances.

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When carrying out this operation, the main attention should be paid to perennials, since only some of them are able to survive in snowy winters. For most perennial flowers, such winters are dangerous, and therefore they often freeze. Since no one will tell us what winter will be like, it is better to play it safe and insulate these flowers.

There are no specific deadlines for such work in the flower literature, but I and other gardeners have my own experience, which indicates that such a procedure is best performed when the ground is already frozen to a depth of 5 cm. At this time, perennials that leave before winter with more green leaves - carnations, some primroses, daisies and others - are first covered with a wire frame, a film is pulled over it, and wood foliage, rotted peat (up to 10 cm) or sawdust (up to 6 cm) are poured on top. There is another technique, which consists in installing boards on the edge instead of such a frame next to the plants. And on them they put roofing material, which is also covered with a film.

To shelter so many flowers, it is enough to put spruce branches or branches of deciduous trees without leaves on them, and then pour a thin layer of woody leaves on top. This will provide the plants with ventilation and protect them from damping off. This technique is quite applicable for flowers such as pansies, arabis and primroses. For hyacinths, tubular daffodils, tulips and phlox, a layer of leaves up to 3 cm is sufficient. This shelter is made when the ground is already 3-5 cm frozen. Lilies with white flowers cover wood leaves with a layer of about 10-12 cm.

Clematis, crocuses, hazel grouses, daffodils, geleniums, anemones, as well as a pyramidal bell, also need protection from winter frosts. All these plants can be covered with peat chips, sawdust or leaves with a layer of at least 10 cm. Chubushnik, weigela, forsythia, actinidia, mahonia, it is enough just to bend down to the ground and cover with snow. But rhododendrons should also be covered with foliage.

Some plants require more reliable shelter: boxwood, tree peony, garden hydrangea. Their branches are usually pulled together with twine, covered with burlap in 4-5 layers, and around these flowers you need to put roofing material or roofing felt on the edge and cover the flowers from above with them.

Shelter roses

Protecting this beautiful plant for the winter requires perhaps the greatest work from any summer resident and gardener. Shelter of roses is carried out in 3-4 stages, since they have very different winter hardiness.

If by this indicator we list all the roses, then the most winter-hardy will be park roses, less winter-hardy - polyanthus, as well as floribunda roses, hybrid tea roses are even more vulnerable. Moreover, all these roses are not so afraid of frosts as dampness, which causes damping and soaking of plants with improper and untimely shelter.

Most reliably, it is possible to preserve roses if the work on their shelter is carried out in three stages. The first stage consists in hilling the bushes, but 4-6 days before that, the lower leaves are removed from the roses. The size of the mound, as the practice of flower growers shows, should be 10-12 cm for low bushes and up to 20-25 cm for tall ones, and this work must be completed before the autumn frosts. At frosts below -3 ° C, roses should not be huddled. A week after hilling, when the soil has settled, this procedure is repeated to fill the funnels around the swinging shoots.

With the onset of persistent cold weather, you can proceed to the second stage - pruning the stems. It is needed in order for the plant to fit freely under the shelter. Florists, as a rule, carry out this pruning in mid-October at a height of no more than 30 cm. Moreover, at this time, an air temperature of about + 3 ° C is desirable.

The pruned bush is usually covered with spruce branches, and on top - necessarily with a film, and it is desirable that the film be laid not on the spruce branches, as is often practiced, but on a wire frame. In addition to this, floorbunda and tea-hybrid roses are covered with insulation after the first two operations. They can be insulated with dry sawdust, peat, polystyrene, and in their absence - with dry oak foliage.

At the third stage, usually carried out at the very end of October, a frame about 40 cm high is made over the bush. During the fall and during thaws in winter, the shelter should be ventilated, for example, by installing a piece of pipe or hose horizontally. The bush should be freed from the shelter in spring as soon as the air temperature reaches + 7 … 9 ° С.

All work on the shelter of roses requires a lot of work and time, but if they are completed on time and in good faith, then the roses will reward summer residents and gardeners with their incomparable beauty.