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.