Avoid getting the manure on the foliage, and make sure that it errs on the side of weakness rather than strength. Suspending a burlap sack containing a bushel of cow manure in a barrel of water for two days, will give a solution that needs dilution with its own bulk of water. A half-gallon to a plant each week will be a sufficient normal feeding.
Immediately after dosing the beds go over them with a rake or prong-hoe and loosen up the surface to prevent evaporation.
A vital principle in feeding rose plants is one that seems to be overlooked instinctively by seven out of ten amateur gardeners. It is this: A strong-growing, healthy plant needs and will absorb a large quantity of liquid manure; a sickly plant, or one that is not yet well established, does not need and cannot absorb even the normal quantity of this food. Yet how often are we tempted to feed to excess this weakling and withhold food from that nearby sturdy bush, because the latter "doesn't need it." Just bear in mind the fact that we do not give burgundy to a puny child that is struggling against the effects of malnutrition, but that a healthy, growing boy can consume an astonishing amount of food and drink.
To review the year's activities in fertilizing: let us put a top dressing of rough manure over the beds in the fall, about three inches deep, with further protection where the climate demands it. In the spring we shall rake off the coarse portion of this covering, leaving the finely pulverized manure to be raked gently into the top soil if it needs this additional humus (the manure's food value will have been washed down by the winter's rain and snow). If our soil is clayey the whole top dressing will be hoed off. In May and June come the generous applications of the liquid manure, and for the Teas and Perpetuals that really do continue to flower, these applications may well be continued through the summer at less frequent intervals, leaving off at the end of August, let us say, so as not to encourage unnecessarily the late summer's growth of wood.
Although not many of us, in all probability, will meet the unusual condition of having for our rose gardens only an over-fertilized soil in a long-used garden, it may be well to mention the fact that such a soil will not produce good roses. Treatment with lime will help matters for a time, but if within the range of possibility we should remake the garden with virgin soil.
The use of nitrate of soda and like stimulants may be undertaken sparingly in the spring, but these are better left to those gardeners who have learned, possibly through disastrous experiences, how properly to use them.
PRUNING
The rose is one of those plants that seem to need the firm hand of man to direct them in the way they should grow. If left to their own devices, most of the highly cultivated roses revert quickly to lower types; they need the pitiless pruning-knife to spur them to their best endeavor.
It will readily be seen that severe pruning, as a general principle, tends towards greater beauty of individual blooms, while light pruning is conducive to a better rounded-out form of bush at the expense of the flowers. Or, again, the severe pruning gives quality of bloom as opposed to quantity of bloom.