Life In Rose Farm

For Southern roses in late summer, the goal is a moderate reset, not the hard pruning you might do in late winter. In Texas and much of the South, a mid to late August prune can encourage a beautiful fall flush roughly 6 weeks later.

Here’s the simplest breakdown:

1. Cut out dead, diseased, damaged, or very weak/crossing canes all the way back to healthy growth. This means any canes skinnier than the yellow #2 size pencil.

2. Reduce the plant by about 1/3. For established shrub, hybrid tea, and garden roses, trim roughly the top 25–35%. Don’t scalp them in August—the leaves help protect the plant from Southern heat.

3. Cut just above a healthy outward-facing bud/leaf node. Make a clean cut about 1/4 inch above it, ideally at a slight angle away from the bud.

4. Open the center a little. Remove crowded or inward-growing stems so sunlight and airflow can get through. This is especially helpful in our Southern humidity where black spot and fungal disease love to party 😂

5. Strip off unhealthy foliage. Remove yellow, black-spotted, or diseased leaves from the plant and clean up fallen leaves underneath. Don’t compost obviously diseased foliage.

6. Water deeply after pruning. Keep the soil consistently moist during the heat, but avoid constantly wet foliage.

7. Pruning tells your roses to get back to work. So, after pruning, it’s important to feed it with a seaweed based fertilizer to give it the nutrients and energy it needs to produce new growth and blooms.

For climbers: don’t cut them back by ⅓ like shrub roses. Keep the long (thickest) structural canes (about 4-5 main ones) and mostly deadhead, remove dead/diseased wood, and lightly shorten laterals.

And the easiest rule to remember: “Late-summer pruning in the South is a haircut, not a buzz cut.” ✂️🌹

Tap the link below for an in depth tutorial video on how to prune over on our YouTube channel 🎥

https://youtu.be/9TjZNnPUVKg?is=am-UP0ME9SJbdeMd

Blessed Sunday, friends! 🤍

Sharing a little glimpse of the very first glasshouse garden Shaw and I designed and installed at our home in Hedwig Village, before life called us out to the country 🌿

After one particularly heavy summer shower, our Crepe Myrtle - absolutely loaded with blooms - was carrying far more weight than her branches could handle and toppled over. But instead of looking like storm damage, those cascading lilac blooms draped across the garden like Wisterias somewhere in the European countryside. 😍

Sometimes a storm rearranges things and somehow leaves behind something even more beautiful than before. Talk about beauty after the storm. 🌸🙏

Harvesting what’s left of these summer blooms before we start pruning back all the roses on the farm next week.

Sadly, these are headed to two funerals this weekend 😭 Saying goodbye to a childhood friend is never easy. I’m praying these bouquets - and their sweet fragrance bring even a little comfort to our friends and their families during such a difficult time.

On a lighter note, for all my local gardeners: despite this brutal heat index, next week is a good time to start pruning your roses and preparing them for fall blooms 🌹✂️

I’ll share a pruning tutorial on Monday so we can all get ready for one more beautiful flush before the season winds down. 💐

Last first day of elementary school for one, and last first day of middle school for the other. And the most bittersweet of all - the last time these two will be at the same school for a while. 🥹

Praying for an incredible year ahead as Ava takes on 5th grade and Loghan crushes 8th! May they learn lots, laugh even more, make beautiful memories, and walk confidently into everything God has in store for them. 🙏📖🎉

Here we go, girls! 💕

This mama will be out pruning as many roses as I can until school pickup, when I finally get to hear all about their first day back. ✂️🌹

Before rose farming, there was home renovating. 🏡

For years, Shaw and I poured our creativity into improving our own homes, loving them well, and then passing them along for another family to enjoy. At one point, I’m pretty sure we renovated five homes in five consecutive years… which also meant we moved five times 😅

To put that into perspective, Loghan had attended four different schools by the time she was seven 🫣

While most people were busy putting down roots, apparently God had us on a slightly more… adventurous path 🤔😂

But living that way taught us a lot - how to be flexible, how to create something beautiful from what we had, and most definitely how to get comfortable being uncomfortable 🌱

More importantly, somewhere in the chaos of corporate careers, side hustles, home renovations, and raising toddlers, we had to figure out what peace actually looked like for our family.

And we realized something: if life was going to be messy and chaotic, we needed a place to retreat to at the end of the day.

For us, that place was always the garden 💐

This project on Majestic was actually the first flip we completed that wasn’t our personal home. And even knowing we wouldn’t be the ones living there, we still invested in creating a tranquil garden - because if we couldn’t enjoy it, we knew the next family certainly would. Swipe to see what the backyard looked like when we first acquired the property.

I think that’s the beautiful thing about investing in a garden. Whether you pour in your own time, energy, and weekend sweat equity… or you hire someone (ahem…us) to create it for you so you can spend that time with the people you love, the reward is the same: A beautiful place to slow down, breathe a little deeper, and simply enjoy being home. 🌿💕

And trust me, it’s always worth it in the end..

First pic of Shaw and Anthony installing and maintaining the cutting rose garden.🪏 Link below to get started!

https://www.lifeinroseservices.com

Wherever life takes us, I know we can always count on one another to dive in, figure it out, and somehow make it work… together 🥰

Cheers to 23 years together and 17 years of wedded bliss with my other rose-farming half 🌹

They say the right person makes you better - encourages growth, leads with kindness, and loves with steady support…in a way that makes you become more of who you were meant to be.

I say God couldn’t have chosen a better person for me 🕊️💝

You’re still my all-time favorite, Shaw. Happy anniversary, Booboo! 🥂

Here’s to everything we’ve built, everything we’ve weathered, and whatever adventure God has waiting for us next. 🤍 08.08.09

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” - John 20:29

I’ve lived by these words most of my life, even before I fully realized it 🕊️

Rose growing has a funny way of making that lesson very literal. So much of the work happens beneath the surface, down at the roots, where no one can see it. You water, nurture, wait, and trust that something beautiful is happening underground.

Then one sweet day, the blooms finally appear.

And sometimes… they don’t 😂 But even then, all is not lost. There is still beauty in the struggle, wisdom in the waiting, and usually a lesson we probably did not ask for…but needed anyway.

At Life In Rose Farm, we test and trial garden rose varieties ahead of time to help take the guesswork out of your growing experience. We curate the strongest, hardiest, most beautiful, and most fragrant cut-flower roses that can better handle our lovely Southern heat, humidity, pests, and diseases 🙃🙌

But we also know that sometimes even the most passionate gardeners need a little help - and we are here for that too 🥰

I am so excited to finally share what’s ahead for Life In Rose Farm! This has been in the works for quite some time, and although I’ve been tiptoeing around the idea, I finally feel ready to take on the challenge.

I say “I’m ready”… but are we ever really ready?! 😂 Don’t we usually just dive in, trust the process, and figure it out as we go? 🤷‍♀️

Effective immediately, we are now offering:

🌿 Garden design and installation
🌹 Comprehensive rose care and protection
🌱 Lawn and landscape maintenance

Whether you are a hands-on DIY gardener who needs a little guidance or someone who would rather leave the work to us, we are here to meet you wherever you are in your growing journey.

📣Potted rose sales will resume next spring, and bare-root roses will be available for preorder beginning in early November. Shipping will begin as early as January.

The future of Life In Rose Farm may look a little different, but our mission remains the same: to cultivate beauty, joy, and faith—one garden, one rose, and one hopeful beginning at a time 🌹🙏 Tap the link below to learn more!

https://www.lifeinroseservices.com

A blessed weekend with double the excitement - and double the reasons to celebrate these girlies! 💕

First, meet the newest addition to our household: Badger Bennett 🐶 He’s a Great Pyrenees mix, and he’s already been assigned the very important task of helping keep the deer away from our roses. Isn’t he the cutest little farmhand?! 🌹

When we sold the farm, we considered bringing our longtime Pyrenees home with us. But they’ve spent years protecting the rose farm from predators and deer, and because they were thriving in their familiar environment, we felt it was best to let them stay with the new owners 😢

Meanwhile, the deer have taken full advantage of our home rose garden—and honestly, nothing keeps them away quite like a good farm dog.

So this little guy will start out at home with us. Depending on how things go, we may eventually swap him with one of the older dogs at the farm, or simply keep everyone where they feel happiest and most at home 🐶🌹

Second, school volleyball is officially back in session, and this season we have not one, but two reasons to hoot and holler! 🏐

Ava could not be more thrilled to join her big sister in representing Christ the Redeemer Catholic School Volleyball! Although she is still in elementary school and entering fifth grade, Ava earned the privilege of playing on the middle school Junior Varsity team, while big sis will rep the Varsity team 🙌

Both girls poured their hearts into tryouts and hustled hard to earn their placements. We could not be prouder - or more excited to fill the stands and cheer on the Nguyen sisters this season!

Let the games…and the very loud family cheering begin! 🏐📣🙏

THE ROSE that single-handedly jump-started our rose-farming journey 🤍

I am not a jealous or envious person by any means… BUT when I first laid eyes on this beauty on a friend’s social page, I wanted nothing more than to covet her blooms 😂 I mean, can y’all really blame me?! 😍

This heavenly scented rose by breeder Kordes Rosen is called Earth Angel here in the U.S., and truly, she is perfection in every way, shape, and form 💝

Romantic, petal-packed, beautifully cupped, and filled with that dreamy old-world charm we rose lovers cannot resist.

But the very best part?

She absolutely THRIVES in our yucky Southern heat and humidity!!!!!! 🙌

Earth Angel is a must-have for every rose garden, but especially for those of us gardening in the South, where growing cut, delicate, old-world-garden style roses can feel nearly impossible. So many of the varieties we fall in love with are far better suited for cooler, gentler climates—but Earth Angel gives us all that romance, fragrance, and beauty without completely falling apart in our weather.

She didn’t just earn a place in our garden. She helped inspire an entire rose farm 🤍 God really knew how to motivate a gal, didn’t He?! 🙏 Excited for the return of these beautiful blooms in the upcoming months!