During the National Convention and Rose Show in Shreveport, we were pleased to win our second National Mini Challenge Class, The Ralph Moore National Challenge, having won the Robert E. & Mildred C. Lawton National Miniature Challenge in Mobile. At the upcoming Charlotte National, we plan to enter these classes again.

If I can attribute anything to our success, it would have to be that we had done careful planning and were very organized in our approach to winning these classes.

I spent a lot of time in the garden, monitoring the progress of the roses and clipping unwanted side growth as it appeared. The roses were misted every other night with Orthene to prevent thrip damage. For a large garden such as ours, I find it easier to use the Mantis sprayer for misting, putting a fog of Orthene over the beds. We used extra fish emulsion and I scratched in blood meal. We had already scratched in a full cup of organic mixture when we did the fall cut-back.

Cutting was done in the three or four days immediately prior to the show. I tried something different this time as far as storage of blooms. Usually, I do not cover the miniature blooms, but decided to see if putting plastic baggies over the cups would help hold the blooms longer. I do believe that it helped and it gave an added protection to the petals as they were packed into the cooler. As I cut, I washed each bloom to remove any spray residue, being careful to not wet the bloom. I recut the stem underwater in a round bowl and put the bloom in a cup of very warm water to "harden off" for 30 minutes. Then the blooms were placed in cups with a Flora-Life preservative solution for refrigeration.

We packed the blooms in a large Gott chest with blue ice packs in the lid and in a smaller cooler. They were transported in plastic drink cups for the fifteen hour drive.

As we arrived at the show at 4:00 am, we were dismayed to discover that there was no table left and no vases. The show chairman found a table and set it up. A call across the show room floor and the graciousness of some friends supplied us with some vases. We quickly went to work, not wanting to waste any more valuable time. We lined the cups up in alphabetical order and quickly and methodically began to pick the best of the specimens. Knowing that we wanted to enter both mini national challenges, we picked the best two of each variety where we could. We set up vases in two areas, one for the Ralph Moore and one for the Lawton Challenge and put what we felt were our best blooms into the vases. At this point we did not do any propping. This was to see what we would use. Once twelve were picked for the Lawton, I began staging them in the vase. We decided what were the best 15 possibilities for the Ralph Moore and Bob began propping them in individual vases. He made sure that all were the same height. Once they were propped, we began taking a hard look at what we felt were the very best nine of the lot.

Then with the nine chosen, I began to "play" with various forms of staging them to the best advantage. I had an excellent Fairhope that probably could have won a Mini Queen in a local show, so in order to have the judges focus on its excellence, I decided to stage my entry in the form of a V with the front of the V facing the judges. Of course, the Fairhope was at the front. I had more orange varieties than I would have liked, but interspersed them between other colors. I have learned that matching size and form is more important than color considerations.

With the roses selected, we now put finishing touches on them, polishing leaves, trimming petals, and adjusting petals where necessary and putting entry cards on the vases. We carried files boxes of entry cards for all varieties that were completely filled out except for class and section. We waited until the very last moments to take our entries to the show table. If it had become necessary to replace a particular variety, we had other possibilities for a quick switch. While I worked on the few large roses, we had planned to enter, Bob went through the rest of the minis and put in some single entries for the court. One of those entries, Voyager, appeared on the mini court.

Once the judging was over, we went back to the show hall, where I was greeted by Doris Morgan who told us that we had won the Ralph Moore National Challenge. What a thrill!