The Perfect Partner--Expanding to Commercial Scale

This past week has been tumultuous, to say the least. Not only did I meet a wonderful man (yeah, he’s single) but he turned out to be an expert rose gardener with some cash to invest in a venture.

Don’t worry, I checked out his bona fides and he passed with flying colors. His family comes from Majorca, off the coast of Spain, and they’ve been growing roses ever since the Moors settled in the Iberian Peninsula.

He took all my plans and pointed out the amateurishness of what I was planning to do. To have a tiny hydroponic setup in the basement and an outdoor rose garden in a cold climate isn’t exactly commercially viable.

I guess deep down I knew this already, but I needed an expert to point out my mistakes. But he not only criticized, he offered an alternative solution. This sounds really attractive, the more I think about it.

He suggested buying some real estate in the zone that allows agriculture on the outskirts of Mississauga. He agrees that hydroponics is the way of the future, so his plan is to set up three huge glass greenhouses to grow roses on a commercial scale.

“Why don’t we cover the greenhouses with plastic to save money?” I asked naively, but Pedro (yeah, that’s his name) said that his family has been growing roses under glass for centuries and he wasn’t about to change.

He pointed out that plastics deteriorate in the sun and that the molecules the plastic cover sheds eventually settle on and are absorbed by the roses. He realizes that glazed glass is much more expensive, but he swears by it and has adjusted his budget projections accordingly.

Coincidentally, a favorite uncle of mine passed away last month and it was a real surprise that he left me some money. I didn’t even know that he was a player in the stock market and he seemed to have made some astute investments that created an investment fund in the six figures.

(It's great that he cashed in before this week's market jitters!)

He didn’t have any children, so he divided the money between my two brothers and I. This inheritance enables me to talk to Pedro as an equity investor in his rose growing scheme.

Before you start thinking that all this is moving too fast and that my head is clouded by the fact that I’m attracted to Pedro (I don’t deny this), rest assured that my accountant and lawyer are both involved in these preliminary stages of the venture.

Pedro already found the ideal location and we’ll be signing the partnership papers in a few days. The next step is to purchase the land. He’s happy to call the company Jill & Pedro’s Hydro Roses and was very pleased that I had done the marketing research that proves that we’ll be able to sell the flowers in this fast growing community.

Pedro was also very interested in what I was planning to feed our roses. He said that his family has been growing roses organically but that he wasn’t opposed to synthetic fertilizers, per se, provided that they have a proven track record. I showed him my albums of my prize-winning carnations, and he was impressed.

“I grew all these beautiful flowers using Advanced Nutrients products,” I told him. He spent hours doing research on the Advanced Nutrients website--he especially liked the Advancedepedia. “What a great company, they’ve really done their homework,” was his conclusion.

Then he insisted on calling the company’s tech info line. He told the man on the phone that he wanted an in-depth session. He quizzed the tech guy about Micro, Grow, and Bloom, their composition and Nitrogen content. It wasn’t enough for Pedro that Micro has 5% Nitrogen, he wanted to know in what form. (The answer was nitrates.)

Then he asked about the Nitrogen in Grow. It turned out that of the 2% Nitrogen in Grow, 1.7% was also as nitrates, with only .3 as Ammoniacal Nitrogen. So the tech guy ended up agreeing with my solution of minimizing the Micro in order to cut down on the Nitrogen content of our fertilizer mix.

Pedro liked Sensi Cal Mg Grow and Sensi Cal Mg Bloom, because they contained the same list of chelated micronutrients featured in Micro, but without the 5% Nitrogen. Pedro agreed that giving our roses too much Nitrogen would result in too much vegetative growth at the expense of superb blooms.

By skillfully blending Grow and Bloom with a small quantity of Micro, we will end up with an NPK of 3-6-10, which is within the suggested ratio of the Nitrogen being 50% of the Phoshphates and 30% of the Potassium.

“Always pour in the ingredient with the most Nitrogen first,” warned the Advanced Nutrients tech guy, so we will be adding the proper quantity of Grow first of all. Then a reduced quantity of Micro, and finally, the Bloom.

The reason these three ingredients come separately is because if they came in the same bottle the chemicals would bind together and they would be useless to our roses.

Pedro was elated with Piranha, Tarantula, and Voodoo Juice and said that he has been looking for products like these for years. “I knew the trick of treating the roots with beneficial microorganisms,” he said, “but obtaining them was never easy. Thanks so much, dear Jill, for introducing me to Advanced Nutrients.”

He also explored the advantages of using Grandma Enggy’s Humic Acid and Fulvic Acid and was very glad to hear from the Advanced Nutrients technical people that the company is working with local farmers in growing half their crops with Humic and Fulvic and the other half without, in order to verify the benefits of these two magic ingredients.

Pedro is certain that using these two Grandma Enggy’s products, along with her Seaweed Extract, will result in prize-winning blooms the very first season of our greenhouse operation. “It’s a myth that you have to wait one or two years before you can have huge roses,” he said.

“If you treat your flowers right, they’ll reward you with large, fragrant blooms. But you have to have the correct watering and feeding regimen, as well as the proper lighting conditions."

Pedro agreed that coco coir is the best growing medium for roses, but instead of my Drip Irrigation System, he recommended using the Nutrient Film Technique that they’ve been perfecting in Majorca.

We’ll have to have further discussions about this, but he showed me some pictures of the flowers they have produced in their greenhouses and they truly knocked me out. Not only is he a handsome man and an expert rose grower, but also an accomplished photographer.

Where is this all leading? I’ll report next week. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

Selecting Best Varieties, Expanding to Backyard?

We’re still getting some wet snow and flurries, but I see in the forecast that there are some sunny days ahead. The thermometer will drop to -9 Celsius tonight, but after even lower temperatures during the last week of February, they say that it will warm up in March.

My friend in British Columbia is already pruning his roses and enjoying the crocuses that have sprung out of the comparatively warm ground. Here in Ontario, spring comes much later, but we’re used to it.

I’ve been doing a lot more research and some creative thinking. While my basement rec room was perfect for growing carnations, I’m worried that it won’t be big enough for roses.

I have practically nil experience growing flowers in soil, but a fellow grower is trying to talk me into converting my bare back yard into a rose garden this spring.

At 35’ x 30’ the yard is 1050 square feet, which is about four times the size of my basement. I would still have the hydroponic setup in the rec room, but this would increase my yield substantially and provide me with much needed experience growing roses in soil.

I could plant the same varieties indoors and out and see which ones thrive in either environment. Or I could diversify the varieties that I plant, thus increasing my attractiveness to potential buyers.

I’ve been poring through nursery catalogues and books, trying to pinpoint the varieties of roses that I would be interested in growing. I decided to grow only Hybrid Tea Roses, since they are the aristocrats of the rose world and come closest to what I imagine a rose should look like.

Hybrid Tea Roses have been around since 1867—they are the result of crossing the delicate Tea Rose with a variety known as Hybrid Perpetual. Contrary to rumors, some of the Hybrid Teas have retained their fragrance, even though they have been bred and cross-bred for so long.

At first I was attracted to a bi-color rose called Piccadilly. The vivid reds and yellows of this classic shaped rose give it a very classy appearance. It grows vigorously, but only reaches two and a half feet when fully grown, which would be ideal for my grow space.

However, its disease resistance has decreased in recent years, so now it’s prone to pathogens. Regardless of its beauty, I decided to pass on this variety.

Then I came upon a hybrid called Fragrant Cloud. It was introduced in 1964, so the commercial patent on it had definitely run out. However, I’ve since found out that it’s brilliant red color does fade with age and it’s also prone to Black Spot and Mildew. This headache I can do without.

My first real choice is called Alec’s Red. It’s a multiple award winner that grows to about three feet tall at maturity and is widely available. It is a good choice for exhibitions and cut flowers and its fragrance is rich and sweet.

It is also a classic shaped rose and its crimson petals hold their color well. The clincher? It is disease resistant, which is a blessing for a first time grower. Even though I plan to use Barricade liberally, in order to increase the ability of my flowers to ward off pathogens and pests, it is still comforting to know that the rose has built in resistance, as well.

If I do decide to plant outdoors, I’ll probably choose a magnificent pink rose called Admiral Rodney. It grows quite tall (over 3.5 feet) and its blooms are exceptionally large and well shaped. Ideal for cut flowers or exhibitions.

One of the wonderful things about roses that if they are well tended, they’ll continue to produce blooms for many years to come. So it would save me the hassle of starting a new batch of flowers every four months in my grow room.

The other variety that I decided to grow in my basement is Julia’s Rose, named after a famous flower arranger. It is somewhere between pale yellow and ivory in color and only grows to the height of two and a half feet. It has average disease resistance, but it is specifically recommended for growing indoors.

An added bonus—Julia’s Rose is well known for its long, straight stems. Perfect for the purpose I had in mind. It only needs light pruning.

If you’re growing outdoors, pruning is usually done before the spring growth begins, while the plant is still dormant. You can either prune lightly, moderately, or heavyly. Heavy pruning means you only leave the wooden stems and cut them about five inches off the ground.

In moderate pruning the major stems are cut back to about half their length, while light pruning involves cutting the stems to about two thirds their length. All roses will benefit from pruning, since the new shoots will be young and vigorous and bud formation will be enhanced.

For long stemmed roses, the grower needs to pinch the side buds in a process known as disbudding, which allows for the major bud at the tip of the stem to grow large and striking.

To prolong the flowering season, roses should be deadheaded—that is the faded blooms should be cut before they produce rose hips and seeds. Each bush will have blooms that are not suitable for long-stemmed cut flowers.

The process of deadheading the unsuitable blooms allows for more nourishment to go to the long stemmed, usable ones. The energy that normally would go into seed production is diverted back to help the selected blooms to grow large and fragrant.

Another way to make sure that as many long stemmed flowers as possible are produced by each rose bush is to treat them with Advanced Nutrients Very High Output (VHO), which has been tested and proven to help elongate the stems of the selected blooms.

Additionally, during the flowering stage, Carbo Load Liquid can be added to provide the roses with much needed sugars that they burn up to make their exquisite flowers. For extra fragrance, I plan to add Sweet Leaf, that contains highly sweet berry sugars and molasses, that help to enhance the fragrance of flowers.

I still have to figure out that exact combination of Micro, Grow, and Bloom in order to make sure that my roses won’t get too much Nitrogen. This would cause vigorous vegetative growth at the expense of flower production.

By cutting back on the amount of Micro (5-0-1) I use, I’ll be able to adjust the NPK of my nutrient mix to best suit my roses. That is what’s so great about this Advanced Nutrient 3-part—it is very flexible and you can use it in any combination you want. Or, as I've mentioned previously, I could use another Advanced Nutrients product with micronutrients in it (such as Sensi Cal Grow) to compensate for the reduction in Micro.

I can't eliminate Micro entirely, since it is absolutely essential. The micronutrients that it contains in trace amounts help to prevent deficiencies that can hurt your rose plants. The signs of Magnesium deficiency, for instance, are the yellowing of leaves at the centre, eventually causing these leaves to fall.

Iron shortage in your nutrient solution results in large yellow areas on your leaves, while Manganese deficiency shows up as yellow bands on your leaves. So applying only Nitrogen-Phosphorus-Potassium (NPK) by themselves could still result in damage to your rose bushes, unless you make sure that the micronutrients in Micro are included in the diet of your roses.

Hydroponic Systems and Commercial Roses

I must be insane! There’s three feet of snow outside my door and I’m dreaming about setting up a fragrant rose garden! Valentine’s Day, the biggest single day for rose sales is almost over and whatever rose topic I punch up on Google, I get over a million hits.

An old beau showed up at my door with a dozen red roses this morning. I took it as a good sign. I tried to visit a rose grower to pick his brain after lunch, but my Montana SV6 got stuck in my driveway. So much for primary research.

I did find out a few things this past week encouraging me to proceed. It seems that I am able to keep my Drip Irrigation Hydroponic system to grow my roses. But I will have to decide between using large growing trays or individual buckets.

In either case, as I said last week, my grow medium of choice is coco coir. It will enable the roots of my rose plants to breathe, even when the medium is soaked with nutrient solution.

An alarming bit of information has to do with growing roses commercially. It seems that many popular varieties are patented and you need to obtain a license to grow them commercially.

Then I discovered that rose patents only last for 20 years, so any roses that were bred before 1987 are okay to propagate and sell, without a license.

Some of the Old English Roses that I have my eye on definitely fit into this category. However, many sources say that David Austin roses are very popular these days.

I visited his website and was unable to find any reference to commercial licensing. He seems to be selling more of the bushy rose varieties to the home gardener, rather than the long-stemmed roses for cut-flower propagators.

But a point in his favor is that most of his roses claim to have a fragrance. So I’ll have to explore his selection further, before I make my final choices. He sells directly from his website, and I presume that he ships anywhere in the world, although Canada is not listed as one of his destinations.

Commercial roses are usually budded or grafted onto a sturdy rootstock and sold as a unit. They are guaranteed to be true to type.

Believe it or not, I even looked into the possibility of growing roses from seed (just like I did with my carnations), but I found that it is a lengthy and laborious process. Also, most sites stressed that the seeds need to be obtained from rosehips freshly removed from plants, and not allowed to dry out.

Germination takes ninety days using the wet baggie method and there is no guarantee that you’ll even get flowers during the first year of growth. If you choose to try and germinate the seed outdoors, it will probably take two years to get a rose plant out of it.

Oddly enough, several websites advertise dried rose seeds through the mail, but I would hesitate to order from them, since the experts are clear about not letting the seeds dry out.

Those of you who have been reading this blog ever since the beginning know that my grow space is my basement recreation room. It measures 12’x20’ so what I basically have is 240 square feet of space.

I own six 600W High Pressure Sodium lights with ballasts, and six 4’x7’ grow trays to go under them. If I allocate 1.5 sq. ft. per rose plant, I can grow 18 plants under each light, for a total of 108 rose plants.

I still have to do my homework in order to achieve this, but I presume that I can periodically get four long stemmed roses from each plant. There are professional methods for doing this and I am determined to master them.

Advanced Nutrients will supply my nutrients. I figured out that it will be better to use Grow and Bloom, without Micro, as my base fertilizers, in order to minimize my Nitrogen content. Then I can use Sensi Cal Grow and Sensi Cal Bloom to provide the micronutrients necessary to feed my rose plants.

Since I will be buying seedlings or cuttings with bare roots, I will probably need No Shock and Jump Start in order to compensate for the stress that shipping and transplanting will cause.

In order to strengthen the roots of my roses, I will of course use Piranha, Tarantula, and Voodoo Juice, as well as SensiZym.

Piranha colonizes the plants’ root systems with beneficial fungi, while Tarantula does much the same with helpful bacteria. Voodoo Juice contains friendly microbes that also aid root growth and food absorption.

Sensi Zym has over eighty types of beneficial enzymes that are bioactive and will eat the plant debris in my coco coir grow medium.

Roses require over six hours of direct sunlight or its equivalent per day. I plan to give them double that yet always being careful not to scorch them with the powerful lights.

No nutrients need to be administered during the hours of darkness in the grow room, and I plan to raise the light level gradually in the morning to simulate sunrise. When the lights reach their peak in about an hour, the watering cycle can begin.

Every twenty minutes the grow medium can be flooded for 30 seconds. On a daily basis, roses can be watered thirty times. Roses do not like their roots to be totally immersed in water for any length of time.

Major pests and diseases of roses are downy mildew, botrytis, and black spot. You also have to watch out for aphids, fungus gnats, thrips, and white flies.

Yellow sticky traps hung above the canopy will trap any flying pests that dare to invade my grow room (hopefully none) while mixing Barricade into my nutrient mix will help the strengthen my plants’ cell walls to help them fight off any pathogens and pests.

I also found out about a practice called “bending,” whereby the unproductive branches of the rose bush are bent down and secured in that position in order to benefit the productive branches of the plant.

They do this by helping to increase sugar production for the whole plant. It is necessary that the buds on the bent branches be below the stem of the branch for this process to work.

My head is buzzing and I have my work cut out for me. Next I’ll have to decide on what rose varieties I want and where to order them. Given 20,000 different types of roses and dozens of sources, these decisions will not be easy ones.

Jill's Hydro Roses: Coco Coir and Very High Output

In a way, I’m even more confused than I was last week. I keep telling myself that it’s an exciting adventure, switching from carnations to roses, but then again perhaps I didn’t realize what I was getting into.

When I Google “growing roses” I get a staggering 1,500,000 hits. As long as I live, I’ll never be able to visit that many websites. Also, as everyone knows, there is a lot of misinformation on the web. So what to do?

I called the Advanced Nutrients technical help line and they weren’t as forthcoming as they usually are with their advice. It seems that they have yet to do the tests on many of their products as they specifically relate to growing roses.

In my own research, I’ve found that coco coir is very well suited as a grow medium for roses. For those not familiar with coco, it is a relatively new growing medium used in hydroponics, produced as a bi-product of processing in the coconut industry. It is a fibrous material that seems to have many advantages over other grow media.

Not only is it totally renewable, but it’s light in weight, of consistently high quality, completely environmentally friendly, and said to produce better root systems in a short time.

The property of coco coir that makes it especially well suited for roses is the fact that it fills only sixty percent of its body mass with water, leaving forty percent of its composition for air, allowing the plant to breath.

Roses are particularly sensitive to wet growing media. If their roots sit in water for any length of time, the roots will die for lack of oxygen. So using the rockwool slabs that I used for carnations will not work with roses.

This property of roses also makes me rethink the hydroponic system I was using for carnations. The Drip Irrigation system kept the rockwool moist around the roots of my flowers.

Perhaps an Ebb and Flow system would be better for roses, since it only floods the grow medium at periodic intervals, and then the nutrient solution retreats into the reservoir underneath the ebb and flow containers.

This definitely requires further research, in terms of the pros and cons, as well as the financial consideration of investing in a brand new hydroponic system.

I’m also puzzled by the best nutrient to use. Advanced Nutrients has perfected Monkey Juice Grow, Parts A & B, and Monkey Juice Bloom, Parts A & B specifically to use with coco coir, but the NPK of these products seems to be wrong for roses.

According to my research, roses are happiest when their food has the Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium balance in the range of 1:2:1, 1:2:2, or 2:3:1 ratios. The NPK of Monkey Juice is 6-2-3 for the Grow and 5-4-4 for the Bloom, which seems to be all wrong for roses.

If you use the wrong fertilizer for roses, one which is heavy in its Nitrogen content, you wind up with lush green vegetative growth at the expense of your flowers, which are the main reason for growing roses in the first place.

Perhaps it’s better to stick with Grow (NPK 2-1-6) and Bloom (NPK 0-5-4), with only a smidgen of Micro (NPK 5-0-1). Or to even leave Micro out altogether, and administer those necessary micronutrients through supplements, such as Sensi Cal Grow and Sensi Cal Bloom.

This would actually be perfect, because it would also address the problem of coco coir tending to absorb Calcium. In fact, Monkey Juice has added calcium-magnesium just for this purpose.

Coco-coir also has intrinsic Phosphorus (10-50 ppm), as well as Potassium (150-450 ppm), depending on the brand of coco-coir you use. Coco comes in disks, bricks, or blocks, and you simply break these into smaller pieces before using it as a grow medium.

Depending whether your coco coir is treated or untreated, you have to soak it for several hours in water before use. For the untreated coco, they suggest another soaking in good quality water for several hours, then drain the coco to get rid of the unwanted salts that do accumulate.

So I am making progress—I’ve decided to grow in coco coir as my medium and to use Advanced Nutrients Grow and Bloom as my base fertilizers, with Sensi Cal Grow and Sensi Cal Bloom as supplements to supply the micronutrients that are necessary to grow healthy, vigorous roses.

BTW, it’s not true that all Hybrid Tea Roses are without fragrance. I’ve since found a website that lists fragrant Hybrid Tea varieties, some of which have won awards for their bouquets.

Among the names that jump out at me from these lists are Tiffany, Crimson Glory, Fragrant Cloud, and Sheila’s Perfume. I make a note to Google them for next week and see which of them are manageable in size for my limited grow space.

According to one website, there are more Hybrid Tea Roses sold in the world than any other garden plant. I can believe it. But to grow the long stem varieties that are extremely popular around Valentine’s Day, seems to be the domain of the greenhouse grower, as opposed to an amateur’s back yard.

The two ways to produce long stem roses are pruning and climate control. So being able to control the climate of my grow room, I am at an advantage over the outdoor grower in this respect.

The optimum temperature for growing long stemmed roses is 27º Celsius (around 80º Fahrenheit) with a relative humidity of 60-70%.

Long stem roses are rated according to the length of the stem and the size of the bud. The longest stems and biggest buds are the most desirable. Stems in excess of 24 inches, with a bud size of one inch or more, denote high quality roses.

All you have to do is check the prices for a dozen of these around Valentine’s Day, to know how valuable these flowers can be. If it’s true that ten billion dollars worth of cut carnations are sold every year around the world, then the figure for bouquets of roses must be much, much larger.

Pruning involves only allowing one bud—the one in the centre, the largest one—to stay on the stem. All other buds have to carefully pruned off. I did much the same for my carnations. Removing the secondary buds will cause the main flower bud to grow larger.

Any fluctuation from the optimum temperature in the grow room will cause stress in the roses, which will reduce stem and bud growth. By maintaining an even temperature, with the optimum humidity level, you are basically creating a stress-free environment for the roses so they can reach their optimum levels of growth and bud formation.

One of the Advanced Nutrients tech guys told me about an experiment that was done with a foliar spray called Very High Output. A grower of roses used this product to selectively spray the stems that he wanted to elongate. According to this grower, the experiment worked.

Very High Output (VHO) should be used during the vegetative stage only. In order to enhance bud growth, the tech guy suggested trying Colossal Bud Blast, which is also a foliar spray, meant to be used during the flowering stage of the plant.

Wish me luck in my continued research. Next week I’ll report on my findings with regard to the exact rose varieties that are best suited to my comparatively small grow space.