Nowadays I make a daily visit to our cold cellar in the basement. There, in a big box, are about 30 bare root roses. I did not plan it that way, but having ordered roses from Serbia making sure they would arrive no later than November 15, the end result was that they arrived in Finland in mid-December. By then the ground was frozen solid around here so deep that I would have needed some dynamite to get through. Normally, I bury my late fall arrivals into some potato patch for the winter.

Last year I had some potted roses in the cold cellar. The temperature down there seemed to be a little too high since the roses started to produce shoots in late January. Now I take cold blocks from the freezer and put them on top of the rose roots in order to keep the temperature low in the box. So the reason I go down there every day is that the ice blocks need to be replaced with new ones from the freezer on a daily basis. Once in a while I also spray some water into the box. In not too distant a future I'll find out 1) whether the roses make it through the winter 2) whether I manage to prevent them from starting to grow too early. I keep my fingers crossed.