October Rose Care: 8 Jobs in the Right Order (and the One to Skip)

October feels like the month to tidy up and tuck the roses in. The trouble is that much of a standard autumn checklist (feed, cut back, mound) does the opposite of what a rose needs right now, which is to slow down and harden off. Several of the jobs below are quick and boring. The one that matters most is a job you do not do.

Every date in this guide counts forward or backward from one day: the first killing frost in your garden. Zone 6 is the reference point throughout. In zones 4 and 5 you will do more protecting, and in zone 7 less, so use the dates as a pattern rather than a calendar.

8. Find your first frost date and fix a thermometer to a post

Your county extension office publishes the average date of the first frost; search the county name and "average first frost". Treat it as a starting point. A hillside or a low spot where cold air settles can sit days or even weeks away from the county figure.

Frost comes in grades, and the grades matter:

• Light frost, with the air between 29 and 32°F, burns basil and zinnias. A rose bush mostly shrugs it off.
• Hard freeze, 28°F or colder for several hours, strips the leaves and shuts the rose down for the year. This is what "killing frost" means in this guide.

Buy a min-max thermometer, the kind that remembers the lowest number of the night, and fasten it to a fence post near the roses, out of direct sun. The temperature on the evening news is usually a measurement from an airport or a weather station, and on a clear, still night a garden can run several degrees colder.

Write down the overnight low each morning. By the end of the month you have a small record, and without it you will be guessing at the mounding date in November.

7. Rake the beds and put the leaves in the trash

Black spot, the disease that dots leaves with black circles and often a yellow halo, is caused by the fungus Diplocarpon rosae. It survives winter in fallen leaves and on infected canes, and spring rain splashes the spores back onto fresh growth. The University of Arkansas fact sheet puts the conditions plainly: leaves that stay wet for six or more hours get infected, and the disease does best between 75 and 85°F with high humidity.

So rake. Every fallen leaf, petal and bit of litter under the bushes. Roses hold leaves longer than most shrubs, so plan on raking twice: now, and again in November once the rest has dropped. Send the pile to the trash or the yard-waste bin rather than the compost, because a home heap rarely stays hot enough for long enough to kill the spores. Nebraska Extension adds that mulch under plants with severe disease should be removed too, since it may hold infected leaf pieces.

While you are down there, look at the canes. Black spot leaves purplish blotches on green wood. Those canes come out in spring, cut back to wood with a creamy white center, with pruners wiped in rubbing alcohol between cuts.

6. Water deeply before the ground freezes

Gardeners hear the word dormant and put the hose away, and then October turns dry. A rose goes into winter with whatever moisture is in the soil that week, and winter wind keeps pulling water out of the canes. The damage shows up in spring as shriveled canes and can be mistaken for freeze damage.

Nebraska Extension's advice is to keep watering until the ground freezes, even though the plants are dormant: soak to a depth of 8 to 12 inches every two to three weeks while the fall stays dry, then about once a month once they are dormant. In a dry winter, water on a warm day when the soil is not frozen. A quick sprinkle wets the top two inches and does close to nothing, so set the hose at the base on a slow trickle, or lay a soaker hose through the bed.

Drain the hoses and bring them into the garage before the first hard freeze, because a frozen hose splits.

5. Look for voles before you put anything against the crown

Mice and voles spend the fall looking for somewhere to live, and a thick pile of straw or leaves around a rose crown is a very good apartment: dry, insulated, out of sight. All winter they chew bark at the soil line, and a cane gnawed all the way around has lost its connection to the roots. The cruel part is the timing. The plant can leaf out in spring on stored energy and then wilt in June, so nothing done the previous October looks like the cause.

Pull the old mulch back now and look for narrow runways on the soil surface, tiny droppings, and gnawed bark on the lowest inch or two of a cane. Washington State University's vole guide recommends cylinders of quarter-inch hardware cloth, the galvanized wire mesh sold in rolls at hardware stores, and thin mulch no more than one or two inches deep, because thick organic mulch encourages tunneling. Chicken wire will not do: the holes are big enough to walk through.

Form the mesh into a cylinder around the bush. Washington State suggests about 12 inches above the ground, with the bottom buried 6 to 10 inches deep. Around a rose that will be mounded in November, make it taller so it still stands above the mound. Leave it up all winter and take it off in spring.

4. Tie in the climbers, and plan the wind trim for later

Tall canes catch the winter wind and rock the whole plant in the soil. This wind rock loosens the crown and breaks fine feeder roots, and it can leave a gap at the base that lets cold air in. The fix is to shorten tall canes on hybrid teas and grandifloras, and extension offices disagree about how much. Kansas State says to cut canes to about 36 inches and tie them together. The University of New Hampshire says to leave 18 to 24 inches of healthy cane under the mulch, and warns that heavy fall pruning of bush roses can lose the whole plant in a severe winter. Chicago Botanic Garden advises against fall pruning in general, and cuts hybrid teas and English roses to knee height only after several days with temperatures in the teens.

Whatever number you choose, do the trim on the mound day in late November, not in early October. A cut in October can wake buds, and soft new growth is exactly what a freeze kills. After the trim, tie the remaining canes loosely together with soft twine so they move as one bundle.

Climbers need the opposite treatment, which is no cutting at all. Most once-blooming climbers flower on wood they grew the summer before, so every long cane cut in autumn removes next June's roses. Go to each climber and check every tie: twine stretches and rots over a season. Replace what is loose, add a tie where a cane has started to swing, and wrap canes on an exposed south or west fence in a single layer of burlap. In the coldest zones, extension offices teach laying climbers down on the ground and covering them with leaves or straw. Nebraska Extension suggests 12 to 18 inches of leaves in early November.

3. Find your bud union, and pull the suckers

Most hybrid teas, grandifloras and many floribundas are grafted: the variety you paid for was budded onto the roots of a tougher rose. The join shows as a swollen knob at the base of the canes, the bud union, and it is the most cold-sensitive part of the plant. If it freezes hard, the variety above it dies and the rootstock carries on alone, which is why a rose sometimes seems to have changed variety by itself.

Own-root roses grow from their own cuttings, so if winter kills the canes, the plant regrows from the ground as the same variety. Check the tag or look for the knob. If you cannot tell, treat the rose as grafted.

Walk the beds and sort them into two groups:

• Hardy shrub roses, such as rugosas, most old garden roses and Knock Outs. Nebraska Extension says winter-hardy shrub roses need no more pruning and should stand at their normal height through winter. In the coldest parts of zone 5 a low mound of soil is cheap insurance.
• Tender grafted roses, the hybrid teas and their relatives. These get the full mound in November. In zone 6, mound the hybrid teas and little else; in zone 7 many gardeners mound only the most tender ones.

While you are at the base, look for suckers. A sucker comes from the rootstock, so the sign you can trust is where it emerges: below the knob. In the United States the rootstock is usually 'Dr. Huey' or sometimes Rosa multiflora. 'Dr. Huey' suckers carry small, dark red flowers; multiflora has small, single white flowers and paler green foliage. Do not rely on leaflet counts, because plenty of modern roses carry seven leaflets.

Scrape the soil back until you can see where the sucker joins the root, then pull it off or cut it flush with the root. A stub left behind re-sprouts. October is a good time because the bed is open and the soil is soft.

2. Decide what to do about potted roses and tree roses

A pot freezes from every side, so the soil in it drops to the air temperature. A common rule of thumb is that a rose left outdoors in a pot should be hardy about two zones colder than yours. If it is not, move it. The American Rose Society says to bring a dormant potted rose into an unheated garage or shed after the leaves have dropped, and to water about a gallon per large pot every two weeks so the roots do not dry out. Keep it unheated: a rose kept warm wakes up in midwinter and sends out growth it cannot feed.

Small pots can instead be sunk into a spare corner of the garden for the winter. If a large pot has to stay outside, set it against the house with others, bury the crown a few inches below the soil line, pack mulch around the top and wrap the whole pot in burlap.

Tree roses need their own plan, because the graft sits three or four feet in the air and a mound cannot reach it. The usual method is called the Minnesota tip. Dig a trench alongside the bush, loosen the roots on one side, and tip the whole tree over into the trench. Pin the head down and cover it with soil, then add a foot or so of leaves or straw once the ground has frozen. Tip the tree after a killing frost has dropped the leaves, but dig the trench now, while the soil is still soft. Iowa State Extension has a short FAQ on overwintering a tree rose.

1. Do nothing, on purpose

The most important job is the one that feels wrong. A typical autumn Saturday has three parts: feed the roses, cut them back, and hill them up. Each looks like work well done. Each tells the plant to keep growing at the moment it should be stopping.

Do not feed

Nitrogen tells a rose to grow, and a rose fed in October obeys. It pushes up soft new shoots with thin walls, full of water, and the first hard freeze bursts them. That dead tissue is wet, and wet dead tissue gives rot a way into healthy wood. Columbus Park of Roses ends fertilizing no later than early to mid-August; Nebraska Extension stops fertilizing after the end of August. If you bought a bag of rose food in September, it stays in the garage until spring.

A soil test is a better use of October than a "winterizer". Your county extension office will run one for a modest fee, and it tells you the pH and what the soil actually lacks. Roses want slightly acidic soil, around pH 6.0 to 6.5. Wood ash raises pH, so the ash from the fire pit goes somewhere else. Autumn suits sampling because any lime the report asks for needs months to work.

Do not deadhead

All summer, snipping off a spent bloom makes a repeat-blooming rose send up another one. Late in the season each of those cuts tells the bush to grow when it should be hardening off. The common rule is to stop about six weeks before the first frost, which Columbus Park of Roses puts at the end of October in its zone 6 garden. The park itself stops earlier, in mid-September, and Chicago Botanic Garden stops by Labor Day. If today's date is past yours, put the pruners down and leave the spent blooms on the bush.

The last flush of October roses is often the prettiest of the year. Cut a few stems for the kitchen table; one vase will not change how the bush gets through winter. The harm comes from the daily rounds with pruners.

Left alone, a bloom does what it was built to do: the petals drop, the base swells, and over several weeks it turns into a rose hip. Columbus Park of Roses describes hip formation as part of hardening off, and the hips feed birds through the winter. Many hybrid teas make small hips or none, while rugosas make large ones. Pick up fallen petals if you like and leave the stems on the bush.

Do not mound early

Mounding means piling soil over the base of the plant so the bud union sits under about a foot of insulation. The University of New Hampshire states the goal as keeping the crown and lower canes uniformly cold through the coldest months. Cold alone does less harm than the swings, when wood freezes, thaws on a sunny afternoon and freezes again that night. A mound smooths the swings out.

A mound put on too early does the reverse. Applied to a bush that still has leaves and warm, sappy stems, it keeps the wood damp and can slow the maturing of the stems. The timing guidance from several extension offices is consistent: wait for several hard frosts that strip the leaves, and mound before the soil freezes. New Hampshire adds a number for cold climates, suggesting several nights in the mid-teens. Nebraska says after two to three hard freezes and once all the leaves have fallen. In zone 6 that usually means the last week of November.

How to build the mound:

1. Bring the soil from somewhere else, such as bagged garden soil, aged manure, finished compost or dirt from a corner of the garden without roses. Never scrape it from around the plant, which strips the shallow feeder roots.
2. Heap it over the crown until it stands 10 to 12 inches high, covering the stems and the bud union completely. New Hampshire and Nebraska give 10 to 12 inches; Kansas State gives 8 to 10, so use the taller figure for a tender hybrid tea.
3. Add several inches of something loose on top. Straw works, and straw is not hay, which carries weed seed. Pine boughs and shredded leaves work too. Whole maple leaves mat into a wet sheet, so run the mower over leaves first.
4. In the colder zones, put the hardware cloth cylinder from job number five around the mound and fill the space with straw.

Foam rose cones can be used with two fixes. Nebraska Extension says a cone alone is not adequate: mound 6 to 8 inches of soil around the base first, and cut small holes or slits near the top for ventilation, since a sealed cone traps heat on a sunny afternoon. Skip plastic sheeting, which does not breathe. Burlap does.

In spring, take the protection off in stages over two or three sessions rather than on the first warm afternoon, and keep a few bags of leaves handy in case a late freeze arrives after the crowns have been opened. Then find out which canes lived. Color on the outside tells you little. Scratch the bark with a thumbnail: green and moist means alive, dry and brown means dead. Cut a short piece off and look at the center, because creamy white wood is alive and brown or black means cutting lower until you reach white. A hybrid tea cut hard in April usually breaks from the base, as long as the bud union was protected.

Where the sources disagree

Keep that notebook honest. Record the first killing frost, the mounding date and what survived in April. After a few seasons it will tell you more about your own garden than any extension table.

Questions gardeners ask