"Susan H. Simko" wrote
Shiva wrote:

It's not off season! Winter is dreaming season, thinking
about extant beds and planning additions to them;
dreaming up new beds; going over those catalogs both
hardcopy and online and planning orders, then ordering.

All those catalogs pouring in, all those things I want and
not enough land to plant them all. *sigh* How can these
people be so cruel? *grin*

It's transplant season for me. About three years ago I bought
a hundred bald-cypress trees, a hundred osage-orange trees,
and a few dozen other bare-roots. My clever idea: pot them
up and coddle them for a year and make them into what the
trade calls "containerized plants": more flexibility in when I
can transplant them, better health, etc.

Then I put them really close together on some ground cloth
and pretty much neglected them for three years.

They now have most of their roots well beneath the pots.
Some are stunted, some are rudely healthy and vigorously
growing. In the dense shade there is even a pink climbing
rose given the same idiotic treatment, and it blooms
pretty often.

Now's the time to use a nozzle on a garden hose to erode
away the soil and make these plants bare-root again and
put them where they need to go. If they die, they die.

I have 36 acres. I have room. I would be thumbing my
nose at you except that I have vast weed problems, wonky
power equipment, and a lazy streak a mile wide. I have
over 100 roses in pots and they need to be planted out.
I want vast roses: twenty-foot monsters, but I have deer
problems and too much wet ground at times and too
little at others. Half the soil is very acid, a bit damp,
water-retentive due to some clay in it and much clay under
it, rich in phosphate but no other major nutrient; the rest
is very acid, only slightly damp, not water-retentive, low
in all nutrients. Fire ants are everywhere, but at least
they aerate the soil a bit, whether or not they farm aphids.

I have now bought 25 WalleyeMart roses this month, 22
bareroot in bags and wax, 3 woebegone blackspot-ravaged
in pots.

I have dreams of hybridizing my own new rose varieties,
but it's dawning on me that a sloppy, lazy man like me
would botch the whole meticulous process. I'd have hips
eaten by animals or rotting on the ground, seeds that sprouted
in the fridge and thengot eaten by fungus, seedlings dying
from lack of water, the whole shtick. And frankly, my
reasons for hybridizing are base: 1) the next Mermaid, 2)
ultra-thorny varieties, 3) roses I can burden with silly but
non-cute names like For Cough, Unjust Joey, Vlad the
Impaler, Whirled Peas, Fat *******, 4) super-large
ramblers with rebloom.

Mark., super-large rambler in Zone 8b