By June, the number of roses began to increase geometrically. My roomie was going nuts, I thought (OK, maybe not so nuts -- the end result is very nice, I must admit!). We were going plant shopping almost every weekend -- both days. We'd be out in the yard by 5:30 or 6:00 am digging and weeding and planting. Then when it started getting too hot, after a quick shower to freshen up, we'd head out for lunch and hit some of the nurseries and garden centers. We'd get back in time to do more as the day began to cool off towards evening, often working until (or through) dusk, until it was too dark to see what we were doing.
There are roses in beds, and roses in pots on the patio, and roses in pots scattered throughout the yard. We have heavy clay soil, and amending didn't seem to cut the clay enough, so we eneded up by digging big holes a foot and a half to two feet deep wherever we planted roses, removing the clay soil and replacing it with garden soil purchased from the garden center. The clay we removed was piled up at the back of the yard. It wouldn't have been too bad if I could have loaded a truck with new garden soil, but I don't have a truck, so we bought bags and bags of garden soil (over 200 bags at about 1 cubic foot per bag, the last time I counted). I managed to give some of it away as fill (3 people from work each came and got a pickup-truck-load) and to get rid of the rest I reused the some of the bags we got new soil in and took it to the city landfill.
By June, the number of roses began to increase geometrically. My roomie was going nuts, I thought (OK, maybe not so nuts -- the end result is very nice, I must admit!). We were going plant shopping almost every weekend -- both days. We'd be out in the yard by 5:30 or 6:00 am digging and weeding and planting. Then when it started getting too hot, after a quick shower to freshen up, we'd head out for lunch and hit some of the nurseries and garden centers. We'd get back in time to do more as the day began to cool off towards evening, often working until (or through) dusk, until it was too dark to see what we were doing.
There are roses in beds, and roses in pots on the patio, and roses in pots scattered throughout the yard. We have heavy clay soil, and amending didn't seem to cut the clay enough, so we eneded up by digging big holes a foot and a half to two feet deep wherever we planted roses, removing the clay soil and replacing it with garden soil purchased from the garden center. The clay we removed was piled up at the back of the yard. It wouldn't have been too bad if I could have loaded a truck with new garden soil, but I don't have a truck, so we bought bags and bags of garden soil (over 200 bags at about 1 cubic foot per bag, the last time I counted). I managed to give some of it away as fill (3 people from work each came and got a pickup-truck-load) and to get rid of the rest I reused the some of the bags we got new soil in and took it to the city landfill.