I’ve been reading all this time on how rosarians love using lucerne (aka alfalfa in other countries) to make a tea for watering their roses.

From my research,  the main component that makes lucerne tea good for roses is triacontanol, which is some sort of growth stimulant. In rose forums, people swear that it encourages good growth and basal breaks.

If you google, “triacontanol chlorophyll”, you’ll see some sites saying that one of the main effects of triacontanol is too boost the density of chlorophyll and in some cases, boost growth even with lack of sunlight.

Anyway, I’ve decided to use this as one of my spring “wake-up” for my roses.

Mixing The Ingredients

First thing I did is to mix about 1 cup of lucerne (alfalfa) hay in some pails I had; I used lucerne cubes I bought from Swanes Nursery named Gro Cubes. Other people use them in big drums or garbage cans. In my case since I only had 5 established roses, my small (7-litre/1.8 gal) pails would be enough.

My pails were half-filled with rainwater and since the forecast for the week was strong rains, I just left the pails half-filled knowing that eventually throughout the week, it will get filled up with rain.

Letting the Mixture Stand

People have recommended letting them soak anywhere from 4 days to 2 weeks. I’ve decided to soak them for a week, mainly for convenience as it will fall on a weekend.

Now, I have to point something out here, people kept warning about how this mixture would smell. Like some dead cow mixed with rotting dead fish and so on; this is said to be the fermentation process needed to extract the growth stimulant.

However, other people have mentioned that this smell is not needed, that the smell is due to anaerobic (lack of oxygen) activity, and that to avoid it, we should mix the tea everyday. Some people even go as far as to put in air pumps like you see in aquariums.

What I did was to just mix them twice a day, before I left for work in the morning and after I come home in the evening.

After seven days, they still smelled just hay, though more of a concentrated version of it. The water has also turned very dark green/brown in color as you can see in the pictures. Mixing them up brought up some bubbly stuff (bacterial activity??) but the smell is still just like hay.

Lucerne Tea After 7 days

Lucerne Mixed

And after 7 days, quite a lot of the hay itself seems to have slowly turned to mush.

Using The Tea

Using the tea is simple since I’ve used normal-size pails, I just put in some insect screen in the hole of my watering can to act as a sieve and then slowly poured in the tea. I then water my roses with it.

There you have it, this is how to use Lucerne (Alfalfa Tea) on your roses. Hopefully it will help them grow better this year.

Using insect screen as sieve

All that’s left

This post is for the seven week entry of my 2014 pruning diary. These are the photos taken last August 16 2014 – this time around I was not able to count how many buds were sprouting as it was starting to rain when I took a photo. I will try to count them in the next update.

For the past couple of weeks, there temperature was pretty warm and there was a couple of days when it rained quite well, these factors have spurned some growth in the pruned roses.

Pope John Paul II

My Pope John Paul II has had very good leaf growth as seen below.

Pope John Paul II – 7 weeks

Another angle of Pope John Paul II

Just Joey

Just Joey has also leafed out as well as had some stem growth at the top. There were also a couple of new buds swelling up.

Dame Elisabeth Murdoch

This rose has leafed out quite a lot just like Pope John Paul II. I hasn’t really grown much in terms of stem length but I quite like it this way – slow but surely growing well – seems to be putting out leaf growth first.

Baronne Edmond De Rothschild

The late waking rose, it only had some leaf growth but there seems to be some bud starting to sprout out – hopefully I’ll see more growth in the next 2 weeks.

William Shakespeare 2000

This has grown just a tad faster than Baronne Edmond De Rothschild, more leaf growth but also less bud sprouting at this time. I’m happy to observe though that the buds I noticed two weeks ago are still there and seem to be swelling more.

The next update will be their growth after another 2 weeks.