Hey again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm today i want to talk about deadheading roses (including Knock Outs)
if you're new to the hobby of growing roses you may not be familiar with the term "deadheading" fear not it's
something simple all it is is when you have spent blooms of a rose one like this here is falling
apart and starting to turn brown you can pluck that off of the shrub you would do that for three
basic different reasons: the first one is just to make things look tidy and i guess that depends on
how tidy a gardener you are a second one would be to encourage your rose to re-bloom quicker this is
the reason why most people engage in deadheading activities is to get more blooms out of their
roses the third thing is that if you're doing it with a pruner like this one and let's say you
have a plant that has started to grow in different directions in a shape that you don't like then you
can take the opportunity of deadheading to reshape a section of the rose to bring it back into the
shape that you're looking for i've done a video on this before where i talked about deadheading roses
and also for staging perennials everything i said in that video is still valid i'll link it up above
here in this video i wanted to go through the different classes of roses because i've had some
questions about how would you prune say a hybrid tea or a flora bunda or a rambling rose or a
climbing rose i'll go through all those categories here just to show you the specifics of what's
the classically best way to deadhead roses and answer any questions you may have along the way
this is 'Elina' a beautiful hybrid tea rose you can see that high centered form there and something
that's interesting about the hybrid teas and i'm going to say this in general because it's not true
for every one of them is that they bloom one rose per stem you can see there's one long stem there
so if you're talking about the classic florist rose this is the style you can see one long
stem here as well with one bloom at the top so i'll show you this one here how to prune it for
simplicity or how to deadhead it for simplicity and it starts with a look at the leaves so this
leaf here has five leaflets on it that's pretty normal for a vegetative part of the plant for most
parts of the plant but when it goes to a flower you can see up here that this leaf only has three
leaflets on it that one there is hormonally more balanced to try to ripen this flower so if you
take your cutting down here just above a spot with five leaflets it's more quickly going to resume
growth and then it's going to flower for you more quickly but if what you did instead somebody's
going to screech at the screen because i'm taking off a not spent flower but if you cut it right
here and now what you have is this three leaflet and this well kind of modified one leaflet leaf
that is not as quickly going to know what to do with the energy and it isn't going to send back
into vegetative growth and flowering quite as quickly let's play for real now this is 'Chicago
Peace' and as you can see it's turning into a ball of mush in this wet weather here's a fresher bloom
and i would be inclined to leave a fresh bloom like that with all its color in place for a while
but this one here has clearly as they say jumped the shark so where do i cut it back well looking
directly below it i'm peeking at the leaves and i can see that that's a three leaflet set there
that one there is another three leaflet set but if i look a little further down the stem i can see
that that is a five leaflet set there so where would i choose to cut i'm gonna cut right here
just above a five leaflet set meaning that this spot right here is where i anticipate that a new
shoot will come out now it doesn't always follow the rules it may indeed shoot from that spot and
a couple of other stems below it i don't mind as long as it returns to bloom and of course as long
as i've taken the opportunity to reshape the shrub and remove any dead diseased damaged branches that
kind of thing so it's just maintenance pruning an opportunity to do some maintenance pruning as you
do this and obviously i'm going to go ahead and do the same for all these other spent blooms here and
don't don't mind all of my hibiscus seedlings that are littering the
floor here that is literally what happens when you have hardy hibiscus in your garden
is you're gonna get loads and loads of little seedlings that you're gonna have to rake out
all right that was easy enough with a single stem with one flower at the top but what do you do
when you have all these big clusters of flowers and let's be honest a good portion of what you're
going to plant in your gardens these days has some genetics in it that it's going to allow for these
big clusters where the one in the center here is actually blown a lot before the ones around it
let's take a closer look well this is fellowship a wonderful cluster flowering rose you can see that
on a brand new cluster like this the center bloom tends to bloom the first the other ones follow
you can see that same pattern on this one here where the outer ones there
are still looking fairly good but then just in the dead center you have one that has been completely
spent and in that case i just encourage you to do what i see gardeners do all the time which is just
snap it off with your fingers and that does part of the job of redirecting the energy from these
blooms into new growth on the rose here we have the same thing an older one in the center here
and just grasp it firmly with your fingers twist of the wrist and they're gone and it means you
don't have to walk around your garden with a whole bunch of tools now all of that said at a certain
point the entire cluster will be bloomed out then you're going to follow the same rule as you did
with the uh with the solitary flowering one which is going to go back on this stem
and you're going to find in this case and let me just clean this up for you so you can see a
little bit better is that you can see that there's a part of the stem here where it branches out and
it branches into all the different flowering stems here and in this case what i'd be looking for
is a five leaflet leaf somewhere below that intersection of the different flowering branches
okay what about climbing roses well climbing roses follow the same rules if they're single flowering
like a hybrid tea you would just snip it down to the next five leaflet leaf set if they are
cluster flowering like a florabunda and this one is cluster flowering then you would do the same
thing of just pulling off the spent blooms by hand until the cluster is entirely spent and when you
decide the entire cluster is spent then you just find a spot lower down on the stem with a five
leaflet set that is ready and is the next place for this to bloom and you can see that of course
this one has been is a strong rebloomer this is Rosarium Uetersen and it's already got new clusters
of buds up here so some of these older ones as they go away will just free up energy from the
plant to support those brand new buds and blooms and new shoots that will turn into blooming later
in the season all right what about the ramblers and the once blooming old garden roses those that
just bloom once in the year and then they're finished for the year well then of course the
most important reason for doing your deadheading is uh completely moot you're not trying to get
rebloom out of these plants this one is william lob it's a moss rose and it's gorgeous and i'm
going to get you some close-ups here so you can see some of its charm in the garden it's just
going to bloom that once in the season then it'll be finished for the year so i would just say leave
this one alone enjoy it soak it in love the rose and then once it's all finished once everything
is brown and spent then you can look at the shape of the plant and do a light reshaping and bring it
back into bounds for what you want the plant to do in your garden and leave it alone until next year
so they don't really require any of that ongoing attention like the re-blooming roses do i can't
ignore the knockouts the knockouts and the other landscape roses have increased in popularity they
may be the thing that is most grown in people's gardens these days so i can't not mention them
they actually take away a couple of the good reasons for deadheading one they tend to drop
their petals rather cleanly meaning that you don't have that mess of balled up and mushy
brown blooms on your on your shrub they tend to drop cleanly that's intentional the breeders of
these landscape roses don't want you to have to fuss after pulling off spent blooms the other
thing that they do is they tend to return to blooming relatively quickly all on their own so
they don't require much encouragement the third reason though the reshaping actually makes some
sense because they tend to be fairly robust these uh again the knockouts and put on a lot of growth
between cycles so what you can do if you'd like is treat them a bit like the old garden roses
let them bloom all the way through their cycle and then you can pull out the hedge trimmer and just
give them a good shearing down to the size that you like they'll take it just fine can anyone
tell me just by looking at those leaves what kind of a rose this is well of course those ridges on
leaves tell us it's a ragosa rose and this one is a rather attractive one called snow pavement
has those kind of lavender or almost white flowers but here i can see the lavender tones
makes it quite an attractive thing in the garden but of course it does turn kind of brown and mushy
when the blooms are spent and it might be nice to deadhead those but let's look a little closer and
see that right behind where each of those blooms was it's starting to form the fruit of the roses
or the hips and on ragosa roses in particular those hips can be very attractive and part of
the display of the roses so you have a choice when they start to bloom out like this you can deadhead
and shape and prune and then get another flush of blooms relatively quickly because virgosas
are repeat bloomers or you can let those ripen on the plant and get the attractive and quite useful
hips because they're good for jams and jellies and other preserves and they're big and juicy so
that's a choice you could make or maybe you don't have to make a choice maybe you do
the deadheading and the pruning first thing in the season and then allow that second flush of
blooms or even a third flush of blooms to ripen into hips for later in the season
one final question i get asked a fair bit about deadheading is whether it makes sense to be
collecting stems for propagation as i do this and of course the answer to that is yes on my farm
that's exactly what i do i wait for the plants to be bloomed out a little bit and then i go back
and i as i'm doing my deadheading and cutting back then i'm collecting stems for propagation but you
do cut a little bit lower it makes no sense at that point just to be cutting directly below the
flowers or flower cluster what you can do however is you cut relatively far back towards the towards
the old growth on the plant and at that point then you can look at this stem here and realize
yeah you probably got room for one or maybe even two fair sized cuttings that if i just
strip off the leaves right treat them with rooting hormone and place them under some mist or under
a humidity dome that i can use them to propagate this plant for next year or to share with friends
and so on so yes definitely but when you do that of course just give yourself some extra length
on the stem so you can get two or maybe three cuttings behind the flowers all right that's
everything i had for you today on how to deadhead roses i hope that answers some of the questions
of what you do with different kinds of roses as you deadhead and if you do have any remaining
questions on these techniques or anything else about pruning roses please go ahead and drop those
into the questions below the video or the comments below the video and i'll see what i can do to help