Hi, it's Jason here at Fraser Valley Rose farm
It's mid-november now
And I thought it'd be a good time to take a video on some things you can avoid to help keep your roses alive
over the winter. The very last thing I want to do is
to scare people into thinking that roses are hard to keep alive over the winter. In fact the
Intent of this video is precisely the opposite.
I think that people tend to focus on doing something to keep the rose alive
They want to survive all on their own. They are a northern temperate climate shrub
They're well suited in most cases to come through the winter just fine
They want to survive, but people do things in some cases that make that less likely
In a way
I'm trying to make your life a little bit easier. It's easier to just not do something rather than do it
So the first of those things I want to talk about is
pruning. Take those pruners put them on pause and I want to show you how I prune roses for the winter
Okay, so this Rose here is Folksinger. It's a buck Rose. It's reputed to be quite hardy and
what you can see is that really I haven't done much to it
It's grown a little bit misshapen. It's a little bit
heavier here on the left than it is on the right, so it's a little out of balance it probably has more
material in the center of it here that I'd like to start next season with
So it's definitely gonna need a reshaping and a bit of a pruning before the spring starts, but right now
I've left it, so there's a reason for that and I wanted to take you through that really quick, so you'll understand it
When you see a rose get winter damaged
Where you see it is on the tips
You'll see
Tips like these the extremities of the rose
If the rose is a little bit tender if we have a mild winter or a moderate winter or severe winter
you'll see die back on this stem. So it'll be black back to here or
further down or
in a severe winter even further down and
I guess the comparison I'd make although
it's not a very savory one is to think of a hiker or somebody who got caught in the arctic and
ended up with a bit of frostbite. you'll see that on their fingers and toes the tips their nose and ears
the extremities. So it happens the same way on the rose they get desiccated by the winter winds on the top end of their growth
so
That may happen
to a much lesser degree on
this one here. Which is a winter hardy rose
called Rosa Blanda
but over here this one is a grandiflora rose, and you may see some of that winter damage
So I guess the question becomes what do you think is gonna happen? Let's say we went down here and
before the winter we cut it back to within
12 inches on a few canes on a mild winter
Not a big deal. You lose a couple of inches to winter kill and
The Rose is fine, but in a harsh winter if it dies back six or twelve or eighteen inches
And you're close to the ground that die back is gonna get right into the crown of the rose and it will be dead
So that's the first thing that I'd ask you to avoid
Is just leave your major structural pruning until the spring of the year. The second thing I want to talk to you about is
about fertilizing
Okay now fertilizer
can be applied to your rose all the way through the season up until in my
view up until about August
And then I hold back the fertilizer. The reason I do that and another reason why you don't prune
Late in the season is that both fertilizing and pruning give the rose a strong signal that it should begin to grow again
For hardy roses like I mentioned
That's not going to make a difference. The hardy roses are like the Starks on Game of Thrones
They say "Winter is Coming" right from the beginning of spring and they keep on preparing but
The tender roses they they're they don't have as much common sense they they keep on growing whenever they have the opportunity
So by sending by cutting them late in the season in August and onward or by giving them lots of fertilizer
Again from August or onward you give them a strong signal to continue growing
so I want to show you on a
of roses here what it looks like when they harden off and what it looks like when they don't
Okay, so this is a Centifolia rose named. I'm gonna butcher the pronunciation, but it's
Robert le Diable and
It's an old garden rose
Insofar as what it does is it grows during the the spring?
blooms in
one big flush and then it begins hardening off immediately
So you can see that this tissue all the way to the very tip of the rose is
From almost not bendable and
The rose has done a great job putting itself to bed for the winter now. I'm gonna walk over
This way just at the end of my row here
And show you this one Daybreaker and isn't that astonishing here it is
Middle of November it's still throwing blooms. It's still throwing buds
This rose has no common sense
so
This new growth that's at the top here. I'm gonna show you, with that red on it
stand on no chance at all if it were to frost tonight or go into a deep freeze or get some
snow or wind or freezing rain
That's dead
What I'm hoping is that
The growth that's lower down here is hardened off enough that there's enough energy left
But that's the difference between some roses that have a common sense to go to sleep
For the winter and go dormant and and really set up firm wood and some that are they probably have some more
subtropical species into their breeding and so they'll want to
They'll want to keep on going
Way late in the season, so this is the reason why I say don't prune or fertilize
into August or September is because you will encourage this kind of behavior, and this kind of behavior should not be encouraged
Okay the third thing I wanted to talk to you about is about
Mulching and that's something else. I think you can skip particularly in our climate this one here is Elena, and you can see I
Followed rule number one. I didn't prune this one back and
I also did not fertilize this
and what I'm also not going to do is I'm not going to throw a big heavy mulch around the base of the plant as
You can see throughout the season I do believe in mulching I have no problem throwing down organic
Mulch or saw a woodchips or that kind of thing around the base of the rose
What I don't do is. I don't throw
mulch
onto the onto the crown of the rose and
you'll sometimes see those instructions where they say well pile sawdust or
Bark mulch around the base of your rose to try to make it hardier
And I think it's the precise opposite or wrong thing to do
Particularly in our climate. I'm just gonna show you here
I'm gonna throw some mulch down here. Don't worry. I won't stay here
But if I took this and it's kind of a wet mulch and I pushed it into the crown of the plant
What that's gonna do is that's going to serve to hold moisture?
Against the the wood at the crown of the plant now the crown is
Actually the part of the plant that is most susceptible to failing or rotting
It's it's the one thing your rose can't recover from. If you lost a cane way up high
You can cut it back and cut back some winter damage
That's okay, but if you lose the crown. You're done for so it may be that in a harder winter climate
Say Edmonton or something like that that you may have to take some measures on some of your more tender roses to keep them
To keep them alive over the winter I guess what I'd say is that
There's probably a way to do that and I hear people talking about using bubble wrap or just a dry straw or hay
In wrapped in burlap around the base of the rose or around some of the canes of the rose
One thing I will say is that I'm sure that when they do it they take an awful lot of care
To make sure that they aren't taking a wet material and holding it against the base of the rose and so in our climate
Here the west coast Fraser Valley
It's a quite a wet winter even the straw idea kind of freaks me out
I don't think that would be the right thing to do in fact. I don't mulch any of my roses over the winter
They're fully hardy even though we do get winter outflows that occasionally get to about negative 10 Celsius
I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit, but yeah, that's something I would avoid don't put
Wet mulch against the base of your rose just leave it natural
Let it let it come through the winter like that
And if you are going to mulch just be real cautious that it is not a wet mulch. so there you go
All right well, thank you for listening to three things
I wouldn't recommend you do to your roses try to keep them alive over the winter if you've already done those things
No, big deal, probably your rose will come through just fine
But maybe it's something you can save yourself the effort of in future years, and your roses will probably be better off for it
Again, thank you for watching, and if you have any questions or comments, please leave them below this video