Hey again, it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and today I'm tackling these roses behind me here
I'll show them to you in a minute
But the topic today is winter sanitation how you should take care of plants in the winter in your greenhouse
Now this is focused more on the idea of running a nursery business
But these general concepts apply across to anybody who is overwintering plants in containers
Let me show you their condition at risk of putting my nursery. Not in the best light
I will show you the mess that happens during the winter
And these are roses that I tried to sell this here and they are leftovers. I have a whole bunch of them
so I'm
bringing them back again for market next year and you can see that some of them have dropped a lot of their leaves I'll show
You this guy here is more or less dropped its leaves
I mean if you have a few hanging on and other ones are more the semi-evergreen type that held on to their leaves and
The mess I'm talking about is this on the ground
It's dropped a whole bunch of its old leaves. You can see in the pots. I have a whole bunch of moss in places
I have weeds and
Some more weeds there and
So I'm going to be doing a clean-up on this and one of the reasons I'm doing that
I'm going to show you really quick here is
This problem here black spot is a disease. That's
Carried by fungus and if I leave those leaves to just drop on the ground and then spores shoot back up
The point is that they will reinfect the new growth for the next year. It's not just black spott I'm concerned with
Aphids will overwinter live on active leaves and stems or lay eggs on buds of fallen leaves
If it stays with mild enough thrips and whitefly will take shelter on those
Standing weeds or (in the case of the thrips) overwinter in the top layers of the soil
Some spider mites overwinter and top layer of the soil as well while others laid eggs on fallen leaves ice for diseases
There's leaf spot both fungal and bacterial
Powdery mildew and even rust that will overwinter on affected foliage
Slugs and snails will definitely take advantage of the moist fallen plant debris as well
Here's an example of one that has a big weed at the base of it here just to make it a little easier to handle
I'm gonna do some of my pruning right up front here and
I've done a video on winter pruning of roses before so I won't spend a lot of time going over that material
but basically I'm just trained seeing if I can improve the form of it and keep it at a marketable size and
Easy for handling like this. So next thing I'm going to do is I'm actually going to pull it right out of its pot and
Have a look at what's here this top inch of soil
I'm just going to go ahead and
Break it all off and get all of the crud off of there. Let's see now
I'm down into roots
which is
Good and I can look at the condition of the roots of the plant and I can see that's in good condition
Maybe a touch dry and now all of that's off of that
So what I will do now that I've taken this and I've cleaned all of the debris off of there. I'll just push this debris
Off to the side here
into my bin and
maybe I'll do another one here just to show you and again just look at how much leaf debris and
crap at the top of this pot
so pull all that off of there and
The moss and the weeds and everything
And
On this one here again. I'm probably going do a little bit of the winter prune as well just to
Get it into good condition for sale next year
This is 'Robin Hood' it will rebloom and so I don't have to worry about how much I take off
There and that's clean
And if there are any that still have foliage on it
I'm either going to have to strip that foliage off by pulling it back on the petiole
Or I have to choose to cut off that section
and
Probably a combination of both in this case
And if the soil was quite dry
I'm gonna throw it in a bucket here and give it a soap because I probably won't be handling these again
Even to water until the spring
And now with all that crud cleaned off. I'm just going to top dress the top of the pot
With some fresh
bark mulch
Just to maintain that moisture level and put a new layer on there
to suppress any weed seeds or anything that's in the top of that pot and
After that a quick sweep of the floor and I'll show you how the roses look now
so from the way they look before
Now you have roses that are trimmed back
With all of the diseased leaves off all of the weeds off all of the moss off
freshly trough dressed with
Bark mulch and ready to roll into the next season
Without carrying over all that disease and all the pests of the previous season
The best timing for this work is
After the leaves have start to fall off the plants makes your job a little bit easier if you don't have to strip them all
off yourself
But of course you do have to make sure to leave yourself enough time to get it done before
All the new leaves start emerging in the spring
So for my timing here in the northern hemisphere, it's December in January where I tackle this work
Hoping to have it done before the buds start to break in February
Alright that does it for this video
If you have any questions about overwintering plants or anything to do with the nursery business, please leave those in the comments below