Tips for Caring Knockout Roses

The Knockout rose is considered a top-notch landscape rose that produces ever-blooming cherry-red flowers with 5 to 7 petals and a light fragrance. These hardy growers can reach 3 to 4 feet in height with round foliage and great disease resistance. They can be a beautiful accent to your home and landscape if they are well cared for.

However, if you just plant them and let them go, you might not get the perfect flower that you want. Growing and caring for Knockout roses is fairly easy for a beginner gardener to do, but maintaining them will take more effort and research. You need to understand how these roses differ from other roses in order to have knockout results. This includes how and when to prune your roses, how often you should water them, and what types of fertilizer to use.

Check out the best types of rose food to feed roses. They are fierce eaters and need good fertilizer in order to have maximum blooms every year. In caring for Roses of the Knockout Family, you need to work plant food into the soil in the early spring as their first feeding. This is when the leaf buds of the plant begin to swell. You should use at least one round tablespoon of plant food per plant that you are feeding, or just follow the directions on the package of the fertilizer that you use. The next feeding should be right after the first heavy bloom.

The third feeding of your roses should be in late summer. There are some areas that will need to have a fourth feeding around October. You will find that most growers of roses follow a monthly feeding schedule for their roses in order to keep them looking at their best. Another aspect in caring for roses is to remember that they need sufficient water in order to thrive. During the hot summer months, special attention must be taken to make sure that they don't dry out. If there is not enough rainfall, then you will have to manually water them.