The Spareness of January

January is a time for thinking lean. The newspaper ads are full of workout outfits and equipment. The local gyms have membership deals. My idea of a January diet is the visual relief I get from shedding the exuberance of Christmas and pruning the roses.

There are many philosophies floating around about rose pruning in southern California. The latest involves pruning heavily in the heat of summer when the roses tend to wilt and fade and require vast amounts of water, then pruning with a light hand during January. I tried this last year with mediocre results. It rained hard and continuously for nearly the entire month of January '05, and the over-wintering leaves turned orange with rust, requiring extreme measures just when the first big bloom occurred at the end of March. So this year I pruned lightly in August and did my equivalent of Bush's brush clearing this week in January. The very large Madame Alfred Carrier pictured in my first post below has been picked clean of foliage, sprayed for insects, mulched and pruned down to it's bones to force it into a brief dormancy. The climbing Eden pictured above needed a lot more reining in this year and was pruned a little heavier. Here in SoCA we leave a lot of sticks in the air so the roses don't have to work too hard in the spring.
The weather has been so warm and spring-like, roses pruned just last week have already started to leaf out. We had a hard rain last night, though. Perfect timing! (A big thank you to the forces of nature!) A wake up rose cocktail will be given each bush next week, the rose equivalent of a double espresso.

Here is a recipe for the rose cocktail taken from Robert Smaus' 52 Weeks in the California Garden.

1 cup gypsum
1 tablespoon soil sulfur
1 tablespoon chelated iron
1 tablespoon Epsom salts
1 tablespoon Bone Meal

"Mix, then scatter around the base of the bush and rake in to the soil. Rain and irrigation will do the rest."