Transplanting Shifting Roses

Question

We are doing renovations at home and need to shift about 20 roses and it is January NZ time. What is the best time to put them in, as they are going to be put back in the garden after renovations are finished – around 4 months? I was thinking a bucket might be better than a bag. The roses are about 8-10 years old.

Answer 1

It is always tough to transplant or move older rosebushes as you must get as much of the root ball as you can when digging them out. The best time to dig them out is when they have gone into their dormant state or winters nap as I call it. 🙂 The best time to get them back in the ground is as soon as the ground is workable but no later than early spring. With older rosebushes, they can get very stressed out in a hurry if they break dormancy/start to grow and do not have their roots settled in with room to grow or reshape their base. I would use as big of buckets as I could find and buckets that will not need to be used for any other purpose. The reason for this is that you will want to drill several holes into the bottoms of the buckets for drainage. Place about 1 1/2 inches of pea or 3/4 gravel into the bottom of the buckets and cover that with some landscape fabric that has been cut to fit nicely into the buckets. Then add some nice garden soils that have compost as part of the mix and sprinkle it with water. Then place your rosebush into the bucket and fill in around it with the garden soils and water in lightly. Here we have a product known as Super Thrive, I use it to water in all of my rosebushes when transplanting them, soaking new bareroot roses and planting them. It helps to avoid transplant shock and gives them the best shot at good performance.