Roses

The Kitchener Master Gardeners (8 of us) went to Toronto's Canada Blooms for three activities on Friday - to answer gardening questions at the "Ask the Expert" booth, to make presentations and to attend the MGOI meeting. While somewhat dissappointed in the Show itself (that's another posting at some point), answering questions at the booth was fun. The types of questions we get each year vary rather dramatically.

This year, we had several questions about what we do now to treat black spot on our Hybrid T roses given that many herbicides, fungicides and insecticides are now banned in Ontario. As someone who ripped out a bed of Hybrid T's a number of years ago because of black spot, because of aphids, and simply because of the amount of work that I had to devote to caring for these roses, I was probably the wrong person to ask. I didn't really deal with black spot in responding to the questions, rather I suggested an alternative to Hybrid T's.

There are two series of Shrub and "Climbing" Roses that were developed in Canada that are very hardy in Canada and are somewhat disease resistant. Explorer's developed in Quebec and Parkland's developed in Morden, Manitoba have shown great promise. While the flowers are primarily red, pink, and cream coloured there are a few variant colours. The important thing however is that the plants are quite are hardy and are, on the whole, disease resistant and well worth trying. I put quotation marks around "Climbing" because they are more like very tall shrubs than climbers to my way of thinking.

There are other roses to consider as well that are disease resistant but I won't get into that in this posting.

If you are still interested in Hybrid T's, know that you will be at a greater disadvantage this year with the pesticide/herbicide ban. The following comes from a University of Maine posting. "Spores can be blown, splashed or ... carried to new tissue on the plant causing infections. The fungus survives the winter on fallen leaves and at infection sites on the canes. Spores will not survive in the soil and individual spores do not survive more than one month". To protect your roses they suggest that you rake up all fallen leaves as they are the main cause of infection in the Spring. They also suggest that you remove infected canes, avoid wetting the foliage as much as possible, grow plants in a sunny location with good air circulation, use disease resistant varieties and remove infected leaves as they occur. And then come the fungicide recommendations which no longer apply here.

Hope this is of some help.