Yellow Rose Needed More Water

I have come to the conclusion that I haven’t been watering our rose bushes enough in the past, especially during the warm summer months. I once heard that a fully grown rose bush needs 7 gallons of water per week in order to flourish, but that seemed like a lot of water to me.  

I was using low flow drippers to water our roses and other perennials. The drippers are fed from an automatic watering system. I was watering for about 10 minutes a day. The drippers had an output of 2 gallons per hour. That equals about 1/3 a gallon a day per dripper.

Last month, I replaced the drippers that were watering our roses and other shrubs with adjustable micro-stream bubblers that can output up to 13 gallons per hour. I also cut back on the watering to about 5 minutes per day. That equals about a gallon per day at their maximum setting, although I have most of the adjustable bubblers set to less than that depending on the size of the plant.

The bubblers send out micro-streams of water in a circle. The radius of the circle is easily adjustable up to a few feet. The bubbler design seems to be doing a better job of supplying water to the entire root system, rather than to just a portion of it.

The extra water seems to have made a big difference. Several of our roses have had very few flowers since mid-summer. Now most of our roses are full of new buds, such as the yellow hybrid tea rose in this picture. It has grown over twenty new buds just in the past 6 weeks since I put the bubblers in, after getting about 10 flowers over the entire summer. I don’t know what kind of hybrid tea rose it is, because it was growing here when I moved in.

October 27 2008 11:56 am | Roses