Warning: Knockout Rose Virus Looms
Breakup the Knock Out Rose monoculture.
There are other easy to grow roses.
Easy Elegance® Little Mischief Rose (Rosa ‘BAIief’)
Image courtesy of Bailey Nurseries © 2008
Knockout Roses are everywhere creating the SOS rose planting virus.
Granted they are an excellent landscape rose of high value for many reasons. I fear that they will spread so thick from sea to sea they will become as boring as burning bushes and yews. Knockouts are all incredibly disease resistant which is what makes most of us shun the very idea of growing beautiful rose bushes in our yards. Who has time for all that fussing and coddling? The Knockout Rose collection has heavy blooming, hardy roses that will work in anyone’s garden color scheme. As all roses do, Knockouts are also very drought resistant once established. Oh yes, and the infamous pests that feast on rose foliage aren’t too attracted to the Knockout shrub roses.
Double Knock Out® Rose (Rosa ‘RADtko’ (PP16,202)
Image courtesy of Conard Pyle
Knockout Roses get tons of press coverage.
The plants also have an army of nurseries and box stores selling them too. It isn’t any hype to say that Knockout Roses are all the latest rage. Landscapers and homeowners alike love the entire series of these easy to grow roses. The problem as I see it is that the entire nation will soon have the same 6 shrub roses plastered everywhere.
Sunny Knock Out® Rose (Rosa ‘RADsunny’ PPAF)
Image courtesy of Conard Pyle
Too much of a good thing makes it get old really fast.
Where is the variety … the spice in life, if everywhere you look every yard and shopping center has the same dang roses clogging up the scene? Maybe my mind and eye are far too much into the design aspect of landscape and garden. I balk at the notion that we all have to have the same old roses or any plant for that matter because it is easy to grow and colorful. Perhaps it is my reaction to watching my Dad plant the same three shrubs on hundreds of residential properties my entire life. His idea of variety is to alter the layout and grouping of things. Whatever it is, if you could look past all the marketing hoopla about Knockout Roses you’ll see what everyone’s missing out on.
Let me introduce you to Easy Elegance Roses.
Are you ready for this? They are an even better easy keeper rose collection than the over populating Knockout roses. Better? How about if I let you make your own judgment on Easy Elegance roses versus Knockouts based on the facts. Here’s the biggest difference and the clincher for your decision.
Easy Elegance Roses have a 2-year guarantee from the breeder.
Not from where you purchased them but from the company that mass produces them for your nursery to buy them and offer them to homeowners. Now that is what you call sticking your money where your mouth is. Do you think Knockout Roses would refund your money up to 2 years after you buy one and plant it? Heck no they wouldn’t. Easy Elegance Roses were bred to be top performers in bloom and leaf.
Easy Elegance Roses are the best bet you’ll find.
Pim Ling is so confident that anyone can succeed in growing his roses with ease, he offers you these terms and conditions for satisfaction or your money back:
- Applies to homeowner use only
- Limit of $60, or two per household
- Refund will be in the form of money back (please allow 4-6 weeks for processing)
- Not valid until after June 15th of each year
- Easy Elegance® will administer guarantee for all growers.
- Guarantee may be voided subject to severe weather trends, grower maintenance, or poor retail management.
- Guarantee does not include animal or pest damage.
You have 18 lovely Easy Elegance Roses to choose from, not a mere 7.
Knockout only has 7 different rose plants and a whole lot more invested in advertising too. The heaviest petal count with Knockouts is approximately 25. Easy Elegance has selections that have over 50 petals per rose! Plus they are very hardy own root rose bushes with super pest and disease resistance that bloom all season long. No chemical roses that anyone can grow. Need I say more? Say hello to the two latest releases in the Easy Elegance Rose collection for 2009.
Easy Elegance® High Voltage Rose (Rosa ‘BAIage’ PPAF)
Image courtesy of Bailey Nurseries © 2008
An excellent yellow shrub rose for zones 4-9 that matures to 3′-5′ tall. You’ll have wonderful all season color from the heavily recurring High Voltage Rose. Flowers fully double and fragrant with a petal count of 22. That’s another mark for Easy Elegance Roses, most of them are fragrant not just one single petal bloom variety. Get your hands on the lovely High Voltage Rose today by following this link.
Easy Elegance® Kashmir Rose (Rosa ‘BAImir’ PPAF)
Image courtesy of Bailey Nurseries © 2008
Just look at that magnificent wonder! The Kashmir Rose boasts an incredible 50 petal count per bloom. Disguised like a tea rose and just as wonderful for cutting and taking indoors, Kashmir isn’t fragrant but it makes up for that in decadent beauty. Rich deep red roses 3″ wide will be belting out vibrant color from May through frost. Kashmir is a low growing landscape rose maturing to about 2.5′ high. Alas, no online retailer has seen the need to sell this particular variety. Check around in your area, there might be a nursery that has Kashmir Rose in stock.
Let’s not be prejudiced against the other Easy Elegance Rose selections.
Unfortunately, all 18 Easy Elegance Rose selections are not available for ordering online. I did find some good choices that are available to purchase instantly. Here are some other wonderful colors and sizes from this valuable group of plant it and enjoy low maintenance rose bushes. Click the links below the photos to get plant data like rose bush size and petal count.
Easy Elegance® Sweet Fragrance Rose
Easy Elegance® Grandma’s Blessing Rose
Easy Elegance® Centennial Rose
Easy Elegance® All The Rage Rose
Easy Elegance® Macy’s Pride Rose
Easy Elegance® Mystic Fairy Rose
Easy Elegance® Little Mischief Rose
So why are you just planting only Knock Out Roses again?
There is a lot more flavors of candy to be had from the easy to grow, no pests or disease rose bushes store than you see on the advertising scene. Not that no one is advertising the Easy Elegance Rose series. More options in color and size and the three magic words:
TWO YEAR GUARANTEE
on all 18 varieties of Easy Elegance Roses
Enjoy!
Great Prices on specimen quality roses featured here.
All Easy Elegance rose images are courtesy of Baily Nurseries © 2003-2010.
The Dirt on Soil in a Bag
May 17, 2009 by admin
Filed under Gardening Tips & Info
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Its as simple as 1-2-3!
- Open the bag and pour it into your pot.
- Stick in some plants and presto, you have an instant garden.
Are you sure about that? Did you happen to ask your new plants how they feel about this one-size-fits-all situation?
Image copyright Lost In The Flowers © 2008
If you’ve ever had problems with plants in containers, don’t just assume you got a bad plant. Most people assume that if its sold in a bag at the store the stuff is a miracle wrapped in plastic. Well to humans it sure is nifty, but we don’t have to live in it. Let’s take a closer look at what is in that clean bag of dirt.
You can buy three different soil products in a bag and none of them are the same.
Topsoil in a bag does not mean it is worth it’s weight in gold. All it means is that the soil came from the “top” – the surface of the earth. The mystery here is you that have no idea where on the Earth. You should be a little bit concerned as to what exactly this soil was on “top” of. It could be from anywhere there was construction going on. It may be shredded, screened and mostly free of weed seed, but you have no way of knowing anything about the quality of the topsoil in that bag. There is no such thing as the dirt police.
Some brands are labeled “Potting Soil” and others “Potting Mix” … this can be confusing. Actually, neither blend contains very little soil, if any. The proper name of this substance loosely known as “potting soil” is really a “soil-less media”. If you open a bag labled “potting soil” and it is real soil – do not put it in a pot! At least without some judicial amendments.
Soil-less media was created to assist container-growers to raise plants in an unnatural environment. Plants grown in plastic containers in regular soil are prone to many problems as there is no available airflow through the plastic. Drainage through a couple small holes at the bottom intensifies the problem when topsoil is used for potting.
Image copyright Lost In The Flowers © 2008
So, we have turned to natural, yet soil-less blends to assist in getting air to root systems and create quick drainage. Both these elements are needed to succeed in growing healthy plants in containers.
All brands of “potting mix” contain portions of fine pine bark, perlite or vermiculite with perhaps a pinch of topsoil, with a main ingredient is of sphagnum peat moss. Peat moss is naturally very acidic with a pH level of 3.5 – 4.5. A high level of acidity means the same as a high pH level.
Some areas of the USA enjoy “perfect soil” that almost any plant does well in provided it likes the climate there. Other areas have highly acidic soil that unless amended to lower the pH levels and kept at the desired range by periodic amending, the plant will slowly decline as the acidity level rises.
Still other areas have very alkaline soil that offers little nutrients to plants but drains very freely. You may wonder what this all means and why it is important to worry about since you are only trying to grow a few patio containers. To really be successful at growing plants in pots and rewarded with lush beauty … it IS important!
Image copyright Lost In The Flowers © 2008
Soil-less media have very low pH levels. Manufacturers blend in dolomitic lime attempting to make it less acidic, but there are still problems when trying to grow plants that do not do well with acidity. The pH level cannot be measured accurately within the mix of the medium.
No manufacturer will state a level of pH; it is always listed as a range of 3.5 to 7.5 pH. Most likely this is due to the loose, fluffy nature of sphagnum versus the weighty chunks of limestone. Some parts of the bag to be less acidic than others as the chunks of stone shift around in the fluffy moss, especially after shipment.
While many plants adapt to lower pH levels, some will become a sickly yellowish green and begin declining and others will simply die quite rapidly.
Commercial growers know that certain plants require amending the media they use for potting to get the plant to perform appropriately. They know to rectify the situation before they pot the plants. The plant’s requirements will decide how they will change the potting mix. Sometimes adding more lime is fine; other plants might do better with a little more nutritious soil added to the media.
Image copyright Lost In The Flowers © 2008
In my small nursery of ornamental plants I potted with my own mix based on 50/50 topsoil-Michigan peat mix with potting media added for drainage and airflow. Plants that I brought in from other growers required far more watering than those I potted. At times when I was short on the number of a given plant for a customer’s needs, I would bring the missing plants in from another perennial grower. I found that the very same plant potted in her bark-based mix was never the same color of green as those I grew. The difference in leaf color was so noticeable people swore they had been sold two different kinds of plants tagged the same.
The other grower’s plants were very healthy and full, and after a few months in the ground the noticeable color difference of the foliage disappeared. The more yellow coloring of the bark mix grown plants is directly due to pH. The level wasn’t off enough to hamper healthy growth, but it was definitely affecting good iron uptake.
Iron is what allows chlorophyll to form in a plant’s leaves and stems. Chlorophyll is what makes plants green. Pale or somewhat yellow leaf coloring can be a sign that there is not enough iron available to the plant whether it is not present in the soil or something is causing the iron to not be useable by the plant.
Last summer I was faced with a few simple pots on the porch, having relocated to a rented house and no Michigan peat to be had in the southeast. I started testing out different bagged potting mixes. First, there was MiracleGro mix, which I found to have good moisture retention but was poor at remaining over roots when I watered. The light sphagnum peat moss floats around and settles higher at the rim of the pot as the heavier weight of the water pushes it away.
The next set of pots I planted I used Fafard potting mix and instantly regretted my switch. This one was even worse at floating away from roots and did not hold moisture as long as the MiracleGro brand. I knew I needed some real soil to stabilize the mix.
My Gerbera Daisy’s leaves began to turn a sickly shade of yellowed-green and I contemplated what it’s ailment was as I picked off the really sad looking oldest leaves. It dawned on me one evening at dark that perhaps the acidic potting medium was the reason for the Gerber’s angst. I repotted it under porch light. Sure enough within a couple of weeks new leaves popped out in a far healthier shade of green.
The addition of 33% topsoil (1 part topsoil to 2 parts potting soil) to the MiracleGro medium and a couple of handfuls of pea gravel to assist in drainage were the cure. This is my “scientific recipe” for a 10” pot. The repotting recipe for the Fafard mix containers was 50% potting soil (1 part topsoil to 1 part potting mix). The Fafard mix gets one one handful of pea gravel as it has less moisture retention than the MiracleGro mix. The addition of topsoil corrects the pH imbalance while also stabilizes the mix to keep roots covered after watering.
If the plant you have in that container likes it dry, you will need to add a bit more gravel to sharpen the drainage. If the plant prefers a lot of moisture, then you would be wise to put most of the gravel for drainage at the bottom of the pot and a smaller portion within the mix to allow for air to the roots and some down flow motion for water to travel during periods of heavy rainfall.
The best way to determine what acidity or pH level a plant you want to grow will not just tolerate, but do really well at would be to do your research before you go through the task of potting it up. If it really adores a lower pH then it would be wise to add some aluminum sulfate to your potting mix when you prepare to plant that container.
It is pretty easy to research this kind of information in this day of Internet at your fingertips. Much of the commercial growing trades technical information is readily available to anyone if they know how to type the search terms in the right way. To use the Gerber Daisy as an example, type in “Gerbera Daisy – pH level”.
To accurately determine the actual pH level of the media you are going to use for potting, it would be best to test a few samples from different parts of the bag.
Image copyright Lost In The Flowers © 2008
Plants in distress will signal to you that there is a problem. Figuring out what they are trying to tell you is not always easy. Before you assume that you are over or under watering, do a little research. Start by investigating nutrient deficiencies caused by your soil. You will find an excellent, easy to understand fact sheet on this web page: Soil Nutrient Fact Sheet.
If the problem is related to a pest and not a soil issue you might find the information from one of the university agriculture departments or an Extension Service website.
The other area you need to consider is whether it is a disease that has attacked your plant. Try doing a search on the description of your plant’s symptoms. If you can’t figure it out, take the plant or a piece of it into your local Extension Service office. They’ll find out what is wrong even it they have to send it to the lab for testing.
Great Balls of Beauty
New take on a bodacious bloomer from antiquity.
There are far more reblooming Hydrangeas afloat in the garden scene.
Some of them just seem to get more press than others. Granted Endless Summer Hydrangeas is one fabulous flowering shrub and easy to grow too. Everyone seems to overlook dependable old Annabelle Hydrangea. Maybe it’s because she only produces flowers of white. May I suggest that white is really a necessary addition to your garden design. White brightens and adds pizazz to all the other colors around it. A garden without some white accents is missing out on true brilliance.
Hydrangea arborescens a.k.a. Annabelle Hydrangea has some weak points.
This dependable bloomer does have weak stems that make the shrub loose all presence of shape when in bloom. Following a rain it is infamous for doing the splits in fine form when the huge flowers are weighted with water. Yet, in frigid climates Annabelle guaranteed blooms because it only blooms on new growth. In a cutting garden, Annabelle Hydrangea spouts some humongous specimens if it is sheared to the ground each fall. In a viewing garden … well there was definitely room for some improvements here.
Incrediball Hydrangea image courtesy of Proven Winners.
The breeders have been busy rendering a face lift on Hydrangea arborescens.
The initial results are wonderful. Incrediball™ Hydrangea is one stage stealer in full bloom. You won’t have to worry about it performing like a gymnast every time the sprinkler kicks on or the heavens burst out in raindrops. They have increased the strength of the stems to stop the flop that good old Hydrangea arborescens is so adept at.
You’ll have a powerhouse of incredibly huge blooms with Incrediball™ Hydrangea.
The beyond reliable blooming trait is still intact so even gardeners in zone 3 will still be guaranteed a show of impressively massive snowy white flowers. Incrediball continues to pump out these 10-inch wide eruptions of petals from mid summer until frost puts him to sleep. This easy to grow flowering bush will finish out at 4-5’ high and wide and deliver gold foliage for fall color. Hydrangeas do prefer morning sun only as the heat of afternoon without sufficient moisture guarantees wilt and browning of both leaf edges and blooms.
Incrediball Hydrangea image courtesy of Proven Winners.
Incrediball is not what this article started, I just discovered him after the fact.
Incrediball is already available to purchase for your yard and garden. I highly recommend the beautiful quality of Hydrangeas purchased from the astute growers at Nature Hills Nursery where Incrediball is readily available right now. If you thought that Incrediball Hydrangea was incredible, check this out!
Invincibelle Spirit Hydrangea image courtesy of Proven Winners.
New and totally amazing new twist to Hydrangea arborescens improvements!
You get glorious color guaranteed to bloom its fool head off all the way up in zone 3. The huge pink flower heads of Invincibelle Spirit™ Hydrangea are simply astounding. Give the Proven Winners breeding artisans a round of applause. You will definitely want to reserve a spot for this beauty somewhere in your part shade planting spaces. It won’t be available to buy until next spring, though you just might see it in very short supply as some mail order nursery with clout.
The absolutely marvelous Invincibelle Spirit™ Hydrangea will also mature to 4-5’.
At least for those who live where the old wood isn’t frost bitten to the soil. In zone 3, it might become more of a perennial but don’t despair Invincibelle Spirit will still pump out blooms even with a vertically challenged presence. Lovely fall gold foliage on this easy to grow blooming shrub puts a welcome good night kiss on the face of your plantings in late fall.
Do remember the best soil for exquisite performance with Hydrangeas.
While both Incrediball and Invincibelle Spirit will readily adapt to a wide range of growing conditions, they are still hydrangea shrubs. Hydrangeas prefer cool, well draining soil that is rich in humus to hold some moisture. They also will need daily watering to remain at their very best. Dry spells don’t necessarily kill them but they definitely look a bit beat up for the remainder of the season when this unpleasant experience befalls them.
A yard without the decadence of Hydrangea blooms …
Is like an entire summer without sunshine.
Nomenclature:
Incrediball ™ Hydrangea / Hydrangea arborescens ‘Abetwo’ PPAF, CBRAF
Invincibelle Spirit™ Hydrangea / Hydrangea arborescens ‘NCHA1’ PPAF, CBRAF
