Winter Gardening Essentials

Potted roses can be planted year round, however, it's during winter when the largest selection of tantalising roses becomes available. Garden centres will be overflowing with fabulous bagged bare-rooted roses that are leafless and dormant, just itching to find a new home at your place in a garden bed or pot.

Here are the easy steps to plant a bare-rooted rose:

1. Unwrap the plastic from around the roots and then place the rose in a bucket of diluted seaweed solution for a few hours. It's important not to let the roots dry out.

4. Choose a well-drained airy spot in the garden that receives at least six hours of sunshine a day. Roses growing in shadier spots can develop spindly growth and have less flowers.
5. Dig a hole around 30 cm wide and deep and mix some Yates® Dynamic Lifter® Soil Improver & Plant Fertiliser into the soil dug from the hole. Yates Dynamic Lifter will improve the structure and quality of the soil and provide the rose with gentle slow release organic nutrients as it establishes.
6. Create a pyramid shaped mound of soil in the base of the planting hole and place the rose in the hole with its roots sitting on and around the mound of soil. Backfill around the roots with the Yates Dynamic Lifter enriched soil. Ensure that the graft union (bump on the stem) will be sitting at least five cm above the final level of soil.
7. Water in well to settle the soil around the roots and keep the soil moist while the rose establishes.

Many roses also make exceptional potted plants. To plant a bare-rooted rose in a pot, half fill a 30 cm diameter pot with a quality potting mix like Yates Premium Potting Mix with Dynamic Lifter, place the rose in the pot and gently backfill with mix, ensuring spaces in and around the roots are filled and if it's a grafted rose that the graft is sitting above the potting mix. Water well and keep the potting mix moist.

Pruning tip!

A few weeks before the last frost is expected, prune rose bushes (apart from standard or 'lollipop' roses) down to around knee height and remove any dead or crowded stems. This helps promote fresh new growth in spring and keeps the plant tidy.

Looking for something non-screen related for the kids to do during the school holidays? Go on a nature-based scavenger hunt and look for butterflies and interesting shaped and coloured leaves, flowers and seed pods. Or give the kids a little garden bed or medium sized pot all of their own and help them to start growing crisp and crunchy snow peas or colourful radishes, carrots and beetroot. They'll enjoy the shared activity with you and love picking what they've grown.

Frosts and cold weather can wreak havoc with plants and be particularly damaging to tender new growth. To help protect vulnerable plants, move potted plants to a more protected area, drape frost or shade cloth over sensitive plants and spray plants with Yates Waterwise DroughtShield. It forms a protective, flexible film over leaves which helps reduce frost damage. An added tip is to not prune off any frost damaged foliage until the weather warms up, as the damaged leaves can help protect the rest of the plant.

Bring some festive colour into the coldest months by growing pots of vibrant red and crisp white flowers, that can be placed on verandas, balconies and outdoor living areas. Combinations of scarlet cyclamen and snowy white alyssum look gorgeous or a pot of vivid kalanchoe adds a pop of winter colour. To help keep your flowering creation healthy and blooming, feed it each week with Yates Thrive® Rose & Flower Liquid Plant Food, which is boosted with extra flower-promoting potassium.

Beginner and busy gardeners often need help protecting their plants from insect attack with a simple, easy to use product. Yates Pyrethrum Insect Pest Gun controls the most common chewing and sucking insect pests, such as caterpillars and aphids, on vegetables, fruit trees and ornamental plants. And being a ready to use formulation, there's no mixing or measuring, making protecting your garden quick and easy.