The Best Fertilizer For Roses Compared For 2025

If you’re growing roses, you need to fertilize them at the right time to get bigger blooms and healthier plants.

As a general rule, you should feed your roses in the spring and late summer.

But that’s not enough. You also need to use the right type of fertilizer if you want your roses to sing.

What is the best fertilizer for roses? Read on for an easy-to-understand discussion.

What Nutrients Do Roses Need?

Roses, much like other plants, require a mix of macronutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—to grow.

Here’s how each nutrient supports your rose’s growth:

• Nitrogen (N)—It encourages leafy growth, strong canes, and rich, dark foliage.
• Phosphorus (P)—It makes the root network stronger and helps grow bigger blooms.
• Potassium (K)—It improves disease resistance, root growth, and flower quality/color.

Aside from these, roses need secondary and trace elements like:

• Sulfur
• Calcium
• Magnesium
• Manganese
• Molybdenum
• Boron
• Chlorine
• Copper
• Iron
• Zinc

While your soil naturally has many of these nutrients, they become depleted after watering and as your roses grow. This is why fertilization is a must.

How to Choose the Best Fertilizer for Your Roses

Here’s how you can find fertilizers that work for your roses:

1. Conduct a Soil Test

A soil test will help you understand what your soil is lacking and avoid the risk of under or overfeeding.

It will also help you figure out your soil type—sandy, clay, silty, or rocky—which helps find the right fertilizer type to improve nutrient absorption.

2. Look At the Growth Stage and Season

Your fertilizing choices will be determined by your current growth stage—newly planted, established, or container, each of which requires different fertilization schedules:

• Newlyplanted roses—If you’ve planted a new rose bush, you’ll have to use low-strength, organic fertilizer to prevent the plant from burning.
• Established—For these plants, you should fertilize after the first leaves appear and every 2–3 weeks.
• Container—Since nutrients will leach out at every watering, you’ll need to focus more on the plant. This means you’ll use liquid fertilizer, bone meal, and slow-release feedings.

Each season also requires a different fertilization schedule.

When spring starts, you have to feed a slow-release fertilizer to your rose bush, along with a nitrogen-heavy fertilizer to encourage growth.

In the growing season, you’ll perform feedings as needed by your plant’s growth stage and type, with summer requiring a slow-release fertilizer.

3. Consider Your Preferences

Your rose fertilization schedule will depend on the time and effort you’re willing to dedicate.

If you have enough free time, you can use multiple fertilizer types—like slow-release and fast-acting—to make your roses bloom.

If you’re busy, you may not have time for fast-acting options. This is when slow-release fertilizers will be a good choice.

Types of Fertilizers for Roses

If you’re planting new rose plants or are looking to get your already-there rose bushes to bloom again, here are the two types of fertilizers to use:

1. Organic Rose Fertilizers

Organic fertilizers are made from plant or animal materials, which means they’re less likely to overload your soil with chemicals.

But you need to use them more frequently to get the best results.

The tradeoff here is that organic fertilization improves your soil health by building humus—organic material made from the decomposition of leaves—which makes your soil healthier.

However, this process can take 30 to 90 days.

Here are some examples of organic fertilizers:

• Alfalfa meal
• Aged manure (chicken, horse, and steer)
• Bone meal
• Compost tea
• Coffee grounds
• Epsom salt (only if your soil has a magnesium deficiency)
• Fish emulsion
• Greensand
• Rock phosphate
• Seaweed

2. Inorganic Rose Fertilizers

Inorganic rose fertilizers are made from synthetic or chemical material.

As a result, they’re more concentrated, so you shouldn’t pile them up on dry soil or they can cause burning. Instead, spread these fertilizers thinly while avoiding the canes and any graft unions.

These fertilizers come in two main types:

1. Slow-release—They release nutrients over time, usually a few weeks to months, and are available as pellets/granules and spikes.
2. Fast-acting—They are available as powders and liquids for quick use.

You should only use inorganic fertilizers after getting a soil sample of your garden or pots. This will help you avoid feeding the wrong fertilizer.

When to Fertilize Roses

Roses are quite hungry plants—whether they’re in an indoor garden or outside—and require frequent feedings to remain in bloom. Here’s when you should feed them:

1. When New Growth Appears

When the spring begins and the weather starts to warm, you’ll notice your roses unfurling their first leaves.

This is when they emerge from dormancy and are actively growing, which makes them ready to absorb nutrients.

Applying a slow-release fertilizer—preferably one that’s high in nitrogen—to your rose bush just as it starts growing may help it produce bigger and longer-lasting blooms.

Once the growth is at about five to six inches, feed it a general slow-release fertilizer that’s high in phosphorus.

2. When They’re in the Growing Season

While fertilizing your roses at the beginning of summer and in late summer is a must, you should also fertilize repeat bloomers every month—preferably every 2–3 weeks—until late summer for the best growth.

Also, if you’ve planted new roses, you’ll need to feed them with a phosphorous feed to encourage root growth.

Once they’ve flowered, you can introduce other types of rose fertilizer.

3. When the Summer Is Ending

Once you prune your roses in the mid to late summer, you’ll need to give them another feeding—preferably a granular fertilizer, followed by a thorough watering and a layer of mulch on top.

This will help your roses grow a strong root network that survives the cold winter.

But be careful. You want to stop feeding your roses eight weeks before your average first frost date.

This will help you avoid any new growth from being damaged by a freeze.

4. When They’re Growing in Containers

Container roses need watering more often. Every time you water them, the nutrients and fertilizers in the soil will be washed out.

This means you’ll need to give them a monthly liquid feeding—usually with a balanced fertilizer and bone meal to support healthy root and cane growth.

5. When Your Roses Show Distress Signals

If the leaves of your rose plant turn yellow, the blooms come out smaller than expected, and you see poor overall growth, you need to feed them.

This would depend on the specific deficiency your roses are experiencing.

Here’s what to do for common distress signals:

• Yellowing leaves—This often means a lack of nitrogen, so a nitrogen-rich fertilizer will help you turn your leaves back to green.
• Small blooms—If your roses are small, they need a fertilizer with a higher phosphorus ratio.
• Poor growth—This could indicate a potassium deficiency, which can make your plant weak overall.

When you’re treating these issues, always make sure to water your plant thoroughly before adding any fertilizer.

This will help you avoid burning and improve absorption.

Take Care of Your Roses With SunCo

Roses need consistent fertilization during the growing season—from spring to late summer—to grow striking blooms and strong canes.

But not all roses need the same type of nutrients and in the same quantities.

If you’re struggling to understand how much fertilizer to give to your rose bushes, when to feed them, and how to increase bloom size, our expert gardeners can help.

Want to learn how we can help your roses flourish every growing season? Give us a call today!