By Baxter Williams Houston Rose Society
(Excerpted from Baxter’s Powerpoint show “Things I Wish I’d Known Sooner”)
• A single 1-inch water line, from which 3/4-inch feeders run to each rose bed, is way-cheaper than separate long 1-inch lines to each bed, timewise and moneywise.
• There are no effective thrips-eaters.
• Spent blooms, cloudy days and dry weather also cause dormancy.
• Cuttings take two years to make a bush capable of producing an adequate quantity of flowers, while field-grown nursery stock can do so in less than six weeks.
• When a person says OGRs “have fragrance that has been bred out of Hybrid Teas, it means he/she either never grew or smelled ‘Double Delight,’ ‘Oklahoma,’ ‘Mister Lincoln,’ ‘Chrysler Imperial,’ ‘John F. Kennedy,’ ‘Perfume Delight,’ ‘Jadis,’ ‘Fragrant Cloud,’ ‘Dolly Parton,’ ‘Lemon Spice,’ ‘Queen Elizabeth,’ etc.
• Ladybird Beetles (ladybugs) are two weeks behind aphids. Their coal black-withorange-stripes larvae look bad, but are really good guys.
• Blind shoots don’t make flowers, do block light to other leaves, and do harbor pests.
• Water droplets don’t burn leaves, anymore than a magnifying glass laid on a sheet of paper would burn the paper.
• A triple row of roses is a bad mistake.
• The fragrance of Fish Oil Emulsion under your fingernails is magnified after going to bed.
• The outgassing of asphalt from railroad crossties doesn’t affect well-watered rose bushes.
• Landscape timbers are heavy, and therefore don’t need rebar to stay in place, unless they have been remarkably shortened.
• One person can adequately care for a maximum of 200 rose bushes, with not enough time left to relax with family and friends. Same for two persons. 100 bushes is better.
• Talk to your roses; it does you good.
• Never plant more roses than your spouse can successfully tend.
• Every woman wants a gazebo in her garden area.
• Roses like sunshine all day long.
• Roses are poor converters of solar energy, and therefore require enormous amounts of it.
• Earthworms love alfalfa.
• Aluminum foil is stiffer than Saran Wrap and won’t unwrap.
• If I’d known I’d win, I’d have started showing roses sooner.
• Too much alfalfa can kill a potted rose bush.
• If you didn’t get wet, then you didn’t knock off enough spider mites (using a Water Wand).
• A gallon of clean water left in the rinsed sprayer tank won’t let residual wettable powder turn into stone.
• Eighteen-inch lengths of 5/8″-3/4″ garden hose, slipped over 1/2″-5/8″ reinforcement bar pieces ( a 20-foot piece cut into thirds), are good protection for the cambiums of the canes tied thereto.
• White plastic knives make cheap namestakes.
• Rose Judges should have mandatory periodic eye exams.
• A dead bush is oftentimes a first indication that an drip system emitter has plugged.
• A “leaky pipe,” left “on,” will eventually rot the roots.
• Climbers should be pruned AFTER first bloom.
• All roses with the word “Blue” in their names are really some shade of purple.
• To the general public, fragrance beats show form, hands down.
• Leaf cutter bees obviously either move faster than the speed of light or work during the hours of 2:00 am to 4:00 am, which is why they are never seen.
• The roots of rose bushes in pots grow in the direction that they are twisted into the pots.
• When tilling the “meals” (cotton-, bone-, fish- and blood-meals), apply them in that order, otherwise you will be smelling the blood-meal longer.
• The leaf at which a new cane forms on a cane will soon be aborted by the bush, naturally.
• A blackspotted leaf is doomed. NOTE: Baxter can be reached at bxtwms@att.net
