Ouch! Maybe Sea Foam is not a good rose for hot climates. I understand from experience that it's among the least fun rose beds to weed because of its vicious thorns and its habit. I wonder if weekly weed-whacking and annual Ornamec treatment when combined with a few inches of mulch might bring things under control. But who has time for all this work?
I finally hired a twenty-something person to weed and mulch for about four hours per week. Progress feels a little slow, but the person has worked in a nursery and is good at distinguishing weeds from flowering plants. Started in August and we're about 80% of the way done. One more bed out of five to go. Might be done this week or next. I'm more interested in steady improvement year over year than in perfection; and that helps a lot. I've been pleased to find that watering and feeding my roses seems to have made weeds just a little more manageable. I like to believe they are being out-competed by my roses and perennials. Or maybe my constant hovering over the garden this year has kept me pulling up the worst offenders through the season. In any case, this year the garden is looking much better than last year.
I hope that it's not just random noise; I'm going to be planting a few more beds next year and I need to be able to concentrate much of my effort on getting the new plants settled in.
Not sure this helps, but when I was reading Beth Chatto's book about growing plants with low water requirements I was struck by one of her practices. She did not mulch the first year, but instead got a great army of volunteers to weed every week or two. The idea, I think, was to let as many weed seeds germinate in the first year as possible, then dig them out of the garden. In the second year when the weed seed population was lower and her new plants had grown a bit, she put down mulch. Her ultimate goal was to create a perennial garden that required essentially no weeding or watering.
