Breeding and propagating well-known rose varieties is already a lot of fun - how much more fun is it to breed your own roses? Growing roses is a nice hobby, but it requires a lot of patience. After all, it will take several years before you will be successful. In this article we will explain how to start such a rose cultivation. Feel free to try it out!

Growing roses yourself is a challenge

Rose breeding means more than just propagation

Breeding roses is much more than just breeding or propagating known varieties. With propagation, it is already known in advance what will come out at the end - with breeding it remains exciting until the first flowering (and often also until the second), what the result might look like. With a bit of luck, completely new varieties will emerge, which you can finally name yourself.

First step: obtaining new varieties

To start growing roses, you first need parent plants. To do this, select as many different types of roses as possible, but they must all have one property: they should develop rose hips. Now plant these roses in a bed. By the way: Many types of wild roses are not suitable for growing roses because they remain varietal.

Plant different types of roses and cross them with each other

Rose blossoms are hermaphroditic and always dependent on cross-pollination. Pollination can either be done by hand or you can let bees and co. fertilize the flowers and wait and see what happens. However, the disadvantage of "wild" pollination is that you cannot trace the origin of the rose variety that may have grown from it - after all, the parent plants are not known. However, even if the father and mother varieties are known, a further attempt does not necessarily have to produce the same result: In contrast to vegetative propagation, you never know which genes will prevail even with the same parents in the case of multi-variety propagation.

Collect and sow seeds from hybrids

After fertilization, rosehips form, which you collect when ripe and free the seeds from the pulp. After several weeks of stratification in the vegetable compartment of the refrigerator, you can finally sow the cleaned seeds that have been soaked in warm water overnight. The cold period is important to break the germination inhibition of the seeds. The small seedlings should be isolated very early or raised individually from the beginning; in addition, it is important to pinch them. To do this, simply pinch off the top new growth with your fingernails so that the young plant is stimulated to grow bushy early on.

Grow seedlings yourself

When the seedlings have between four and six leaves, you can plant them individually in good rose soil. The growth behavior of the small roses can already be seen and you can see whether you even have climbing roses or ground cover with you. However, do not hesitate to sort out ailing and puny seedlings early on: these rarely grow into strong and healthy plants.

Select and propagate new rose varieties

Many of the seedlings flower in their second year, so you can tell if you've had success or not. If you have actually bred a promising new variety of rose, you can reproduce it using vegetative propagation. This means that you propagate the new rose using cuttings and thus obtain clones of the same.

tips

Don't despair if the roses won't germinate: the flowers need at least four to six weeks to germinate, and new plants will only grow from about a third of the seeds anyway.

Category:

Vegetable garden