Hey, good morning, it's Jason again for Fraser Valley Rose farm here
I am on my farm on a cloudy rainy dreary morning
But I'm using it to prune roses and I thought it might be high time for me to make a video
Going through some of the most common rules that are quoted in teaching beginners how to prune roses
So I've picked the seven most common rules and guidelines and let me be straight here
I think these rules and guidelines are intended to be helpful to simplify the process for people who are a little nervous about pruning their
Roses, but without context they can also be a little bit confusing so I chosen the top seven here
I'm going to go through them one by one and tear them apart of it
Give you the reasons why they're the rules are there and also tell you whether I agree with them or disagree
With them stick around you will learn how to prune roses along the way I promise
so the first of those rules is to preen your roses when the forsythia is in bloom and
forsythia is
This yellow shrub and I'll include a picture of it in the landscape as well
But this yellow shrub blooms early in the season most temperate climates, one of the earliest things in bloom
But it's not the only thing in bloom at this time of year so you can see here
This is my Japanese quince. This here is a June berry or Saskatoon
They're all in bloom at this time of year
And the idea behind this rule is to tell you when the beginning of the pruning window opens
Sort of to remind you to look at nature or follow nature
the
the plants the early blooming shrubs sort of are signaling to you that
Nature has decided
It's time to come out of winter and that it's safe to put on those blooms and that they won't die back due
to a late frost
Do I think this is a good rule? Well, yeah sort of
I mean, it's good to listen to nature, but nature can be wrong I've seen
Pears bloom early I've seen peaches bloom early and have their blooms knocked off by frost before so it's not a perfect rule
But it does get you paying attention to when the beginning of the blooming season is
Now the other thing I will say about this rule is that the pruning season in my view extends much longer than this
This only signals the very beginning of the pruning season. So in my climate in here on the west coast of Canada that
Happens somewhere in the middle of March late, March and goes all the way through
I don't stop structural pruning in my roses until say August
So like I have a six month period where I could do structural pruning on my roses and not do too much harm to them
For the following seasons, so, you know
It's only the beginning that it's signaling and the other thing I will say is there are sometimes good reasons to wait
Certainly, if you don't have time at the beginning of the season fine wait until later
Second thing is that some roses are once blooming and some roses
Bloom repeatedly throughout the season the once blooming roses if you prune them too early, you'll forego your flowers for that season
So if you don't know what your roses are
Or if you know that there once bloomers or species roses wait until after the first bloom to prune them if they're repeat blooming you
Can take advantage of that whole window and not sacrifice too much in the way of blooms. All right, the second rule for pruning roses
For beginners is to start with dead diseased
Damaged or crossing stems and this is an important rule and a good one
Because if you're a beginner the last thing you want to do is do damage to your roses
You want to end up with a better
Rose than you started with and by focusing on the dead
Material, the diseased, the damaged and the crossing branches of your rose
You will always end up with an improved rose at the end of it
So let me show you on the Rose here what that looks like. Let's start with color
the color of good healthy growth and good healthy branches on a rose is
Green red or orange at this time of year if you're looking for something that's less healthy
and let's try to get to the camera to focus on this one here and
Gray black
Dark brown
peeling
That's definitely not a healthy stem
So and you can see at the very top of it. It actually returns to some semblance of a good color
At least it has some green in it, but down here
It's definitely split and crack and gray and I don't know if that's diseased or just fully dead or going towards dead
But I want to remove that to improve the condition of my rose
So I'll follow it down
To a place where I think it still has a healthy color and then I will prune right there
All right now to damaged stems this one is otherwise a
healthy green stem, but you can see
That along here
It's become damaged and because that's in a relatively tall part of the Rose and I don't
Want to allow the damage to persist there, but even behind it there you can see that these
branches have been probably rubbing together in the wind and that brings me to the issue of
crossing branches as well because if they're rubbing together in the wind they're going to get
seriously
Abraded there and that's going to be something you're going to want to remove
So if you focus on what I showed you before the dead and the diseased
This covers crossing and damaged branches and if you remove all that you can't help but improve the condition of your Rose
So the third rule for pruning roses is to prune to an outward facing
bud. I can't tell you how many times I've heard this and I think it's probably one of the most confusing pieces of
Advice for pruning roses because it really gets people
Self-conscious about what's in what's an inward facing bud? What's an outward facing bud? It's something to learn
And so I'll show you on the Rose here and I'll tell you my opinion of that rule
All right. I'm on 'Fellowship' here and looking at this stem here. This is the center of the Rose
Sorry backing up here. This is the center of the Rose and
Looking at the stem here. You can see that this butt or the
Leaf, that's expressing the new stem that's going to emerge there is going towards the center of the Rose
now this rule says to prune to an
Outward facing bud. So this one here actually
faces to the outside of the Rose and the theory is and what there's you thinking here is
that instead of choosing one that's going to grow into the other foliage and branches of the rose and
make it congested and get hard hard to get good air circulation and so on that you should choose a
bud like this one that is likely to shoot out this way and
not congest up the center of the rose and
So if I were to prune above a note we're facing bud then my cut would happen
Right about here
And
That's not a bad rule
Actually anything that gets you thinking
About looking at your your Rose about what's the future growth going to look like is probably a good thing
but don't be surprised if your rose does not follow your
Instructions because it has every every rose has a bud here and then it has another one down here. There's another one down here
Another one down here. It's gonna do what it wants to it may express one or it may express all of those. So
It's good to think about where your rose is going to send its next growth, but don't count on the Rose following your instructions
The fourth rule or guideline about pruning roses says that
this is
What a finished pruned rose should look like it should be pruned to
anywhere between three and some people say seven or twelve
outward-facing
vase shaped form from eighteen to twenty-four inches to the ground and
What do I think of this rule? Well, I think it's particularly harsh. I think this isn't actually
An example of a rose that's being pruned a little bit on the low side
And also it's a rule that is never intended. It was never even
proposed by anybody to match all roses so it might work well for a floribunda or a hybrid tea that you're trying to
spur on one large flush of blooms early in the season
but for most roses this
Kind of a pruning is excessively harsh
Particularly, if you're talking about climbers large shrubs
You know
rose's old garden roses once bloomers all of those
This would be particularly hard and even for hybrid teas grandiflora sand floribundas
I don't prune this low on a routine basis
Not unless I see some vigor problems and I want to print it a little bit lower to spur on to new growth
Rule number five is a good one an important one
It's to start with clean sharp tools and this is my tool of choice. This is a bypass pruner
It's a Felco. It's sharpened and it's cleaned
I did a whole other video on how to sharpen and clean your bypass pruners an important step
I use this tool for most of my cuts
basically
if it's thicker than my finger then I go to
The saw and I just use a little retractable blade saw like this one here
But the ones that the orchardists use are even nicer make a cleaner cut so you go shopping for those
The importance of disinfecting it is that some of your roses may carry diseases particularly
viruses that can be spread by pruning cuts
So if you have one rose that has a disease
You go you cut it and then you move on to subsequent roses. You may be spreading disease between different roses
So definitely disinfect between your cuts and also sharpen so that you get the nicest cleanest cuts and you don't cause damage as you print
Rule number six that's often quoted is to prune your pruning cuts on an angle
So instead of cutting straight across the stem. You're going to angle your cut
Usually or sometimes they say even away from the bud that you're cutting
The idea of this rule, which I think is nonsense
by the way
is that it will deflect the rain so that if you've got the
Angled pruning cut that it will act like the roof of a house and the water will hit it and run
Off and it will run off away from the bud that you're trying to protect or the bud
That's at the top of the stem
as I say I think this is nonsense when it rains and it rains a lot here it gets the whole area wet and
It dries it about the same rate either way
Whether it's on an angle or whether it's straight, whether that bud gets more wet or less wet during the rain makes no difference
It's the other one that's nonsense just as a slight
Aside here is to take glue and put them on those pruning cuts to try to seal them
not only is that going to cost you time but
The idea of sealing pruning cuts has been thoroughly debunked in horticultural circles for a long time
so I'm going to put both cutting on angles and
ceiling those pruning cuts with glue or nail polish or any other
notion that you have as as don't make
simple things unnecessarily
Complicated keep your cut straight don't seal them. Make your life easier
Please final rule here that I'm going to talk about is to prune your rose for a pleasing shape
And size and to open it out. Those are more than rules. Those are the
Guiding principles of pruning your roses and it's good. That's what you want to do is
a rose like this one that you see behind me
That's 'Fellowship'. And it's a it's a great rose, but it's grown in a little bit. Bushy. You can see in the center
It's beginning to get a little bit congested the overall shape of the shrub is not bad. It's kind of a vase shape
And but it's getting to a height where if it grows another two or three feet this year
that the flowers will be above where I want them and the overall shape and size of the shrub just needs to be maintained and
Managed for openness and cleanness. So I'm going to go ahead and prune this one here off-camera
just to save us time because it's gonna take me 15 minutes to
To prune this properly and then I'll show you the result
All right, all finished here on 'Fellowship' and you can see that I did some things that follow the rules
I used clean pruning tools. I
Cut out the dead diseased damaged and crossing branches first and I did open out
the whole shrub to more air circulation and
More light in the center and made a generally pleasing rounded shape for my garden
it may be noted at this point that
What constitutes a pleasing shape will vary a lot in the genetics of the rose as well as your own personal preferences?
So I know that this is much improved for the season. I will get more flowers
Better healthy shrub, so I know I've done the right job for it
But your own individual tastes may vary as to how
Low, or how high you may want to leave your roses some of the rules I did not follow
I didn't pay any particular attention to in inside or outward facing buds. I didn't slant my cuts. I didn't seal them with glue
So these are the this is the results of my efforts here
If you want specific pruning tips on a particular type of Rose, feel free to leave that in the comments below
I'll do my best for you and
Yeah, if you have any comments leave those below. Thank you so much for watching today