Welcome, and congratulations! Listen, not EVERY rose requires dis budding to mature. Some are perfectly vigorous enough to flower and still grow. However, some definitely are NOT. Many own root Teas, Climbing Teas and particularly yellow Tea-Noisettes and some Chinas can take forever to develop and mature into the plants you expect them to be. Permitting them to flower only slows their development. Weak, stingy growers such as Austin's Dove; many of the earlier gray, brown and green roses; many of the Tea-like earlier HTs can also drag their feet, producing begrudging inches of growth. Permitting them to flower will slow them down greatly, too. Then, you have some more modern climbers, such as Kordes' Rosarium Uetersen, Renae and my Annie Laurie McDowell which will sit and flower like a blooming weed while refusing to climb. If you want to push these to climb, you pinch off the buds, forcing that energy into pushing elongated canes from the plants in their efforts to bloom again. Budding these particular types will speed up their development quite a bit, but they still benefit from dis budding to push growth. Own root versions of them are significantly slower to develop. It's with these that dis budding provides the greatest benefit. It is quite possible your roses won't require dis budding to develop into the plants you desire, in the time frame you have in mind. Whether they will or not, they very likely will mature into what you hope for faster if you don't let them flower. Whether you permit flowering as they desire; permit only some of the flowers to mature and open or simply continue dis budding them until they are the size you want them to be is up to you. Enjoy whatever flowers you want to, but keep in mind that if they are taking longer than you hoped to develop into the plants you expected or desired, removing the flowers to force growth should help you get what you want, closer to when you want it. Kim

Thanks. I'm going to try that. I still can't a good picture of The Prince or some of my red roses.

Thanks Angie and Janice. I don't know why it never dawned on me to do this before. I had a pencil drawing last year, with my chicken scratch handwriting. I can print this on 11 x 17 paper in color and it is fantastic. One other bed has 43 plants in it and doing it this way is really handy, especially when you can reproduce it larger. Janice that's actually a Russian Olive. I'm not fond of it, my sister plopped it in there as a screen to block the view of the neighbor's house. Its pretty scrawny looking if you don't keep it trimmed. So I do the best I can with what I have. Thanks again, Donna

The first has bloomed now, and I've posted pictures. I'm doing a time lapse video of these growing, so I think I have the light too far away to accommodate the cameras. They are under a 7" humidity dome, and the light is on top. If I didn't have to accommodate the cameras, I'd put the light about an inch or two away from the top of the plant.