Hey again, it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm. I'm in my garden today deadheading roses and boy
Do I have a lot of roses to deadhead... before I go any further
I guess I should explain what deadheading is and what it's for. I'll show you how to do it on your different kinds
Of roses. So deadheading is a basic pruning technique very easy and not very heavy
You don't have to go way down on the rose. It's not gonna be a heavy prune that your plant
will take a long time to recover from - it's just to fulfill a couple of basic functions
The first one is to tidy up your rose to get these unsightly
Spent blooms off of your rose
And the second thing is that it's going to encourage your rose to go back into bloom sooner
Which I guess is a good thing and it can be as simple
I'm not gonna say this is the only way to do it, but it can be a simple
as just grabbing the stem and twisting it off. That's the basics of
Deadheading I'm gonna show you better technique more elegant technique, but this does the job
This is tidier than it was before and if you look at the bottom of this spent flower
You'll see that what it's trying to do is form a hip
that's the
Seed pod of the roses and if it forms that hip or if it goes on towards forming that hip it's going to send hormonal signals
To the plant that says "send your energy here
I want to use it for seed development", which means that your plant isn't going to go back into flower quite so soon
So if I just by nipping it off like that just as simple as that I've done two things
I've made this Rose look a little better and I've sped it back along towards blooming again
So I want to show you how to do a proper with a pair of pruners
Actually because it is better to do it that way and also towards the end of the video here
I'm going to talk about
Deadheading and staging perennials because I think it's worth a spot in the same discussion
The Rose I'm demonstrating on here is named 'Polka'
It's a climbing rose and see it has a completely spent flower here. And this one here starting to ball up and fall apart
So it starts it's it's well past its prime. Give a little shake it came apart
This is what it looks like when it's fresh. That's 'Polka'
nice
Ruffled edges of the petals gorgeous apricot color. So I love this plant in my garden
but I want to show you how to deadhead that and
I'm going to do it with a clean sharp pair of pruners mentioned before the importance of working with clean sharp pruners
You don't want to spread diseases around your garden. So spray down your pruners before you get going. Make sure they're sharp
So they make a clean cut. That's the main advantage as to going around and snipping it off by hand
Not only is it a lot more work when you're dealing with a cluster flowering rose to be nipping them off individually
But by using a pruner you can actually choose where your cut goes and you can choose and you can get that clean cut that
I was looking for so where would I want to prune this?
The answer is it's a little bit up to me how low or far down I want to go on the stem
But there are some rules of thumb about this
So if you look on the stem here
I'm going to show you that this leaf that's coming out the side of the stem has one two
Three leaflets and this one here as well has one two three leaflets
This one down here and I'm going to pull it off
but mark where I've taken it from has
one two three four five leaflets
That's an indication that it's far back enough on the rose that is back into vegetative growth
and that's where the rose is most likely to pick up and put up a new chute and
and start flowering again from up here may do so but this is the safest spot in terms of the
Hormonal balance of the rose. So from there, that's the spot where I had the five leaf leaflet. I
Just took a cut above the node
How far above the note in this case? I want about a half inch above the note now
I can already hear people yelling at their screens. They say you should have cut it on an angle or
This should be an outward facing bud
I've explained before in one of my other videos. I don't pay a lot of attention to those rules
Doing out on an angle just adds complication for what I see is no additional benefit
And outward in we're facing bud. I don't go for that. The Rose is probably going to shoot in multiple places below this it's gonna
send
Growth up in multiple directions and I don't get that much control over it so I go for the natural approach
Let it grow in a different direction deadheading a cluster flowering Rose is just about the same
So you can see here that I'm treating this whole
Flower head as if it's one flower, so I'll just follow it back
To where it all joins the main stem there and then countdown
Until I see a five leaf leaflet or better yet in this case
I can see that the Rose has already decided to shoot
So I'm going to just prune
directly above that brand new shoot
The whole flower head goes away and I have this new growth here ready to come up and bring new flowers
Without the focus of the rose
Being on ripening all of those rose hips
The same principles of deadheading and staging apply to many other plants besides roses in this case
I'm in the perennials and I have my salvia behind me
I have this astrantia and they're both starting to look a little worse for the wear on my salvia here
You can see from the flower spike
it's just got a little bit of color a little bit of flowers left on the end here and then it's done and
Then it will pause and try to ripen seeds. And in the meantime, you're without colorful flowers in your garden
So something you can do is you can preempt it here. You can do a pruning where you either just take off
the very most spent of the flowers and you leave the side laterals to start blooming or
You can be even more aggressive and take off
Right down low six inches from the ground eight inches from the ground
Take off the whole spike and see if you can get it to bloom all at once again
I really really encourage you to experiment with this same thing with this astrantia
I can just take off the flower spike low down in the mound and I will get new flowers on that
relatively shortly, this leads me to my next topic, which is
staging and
There's no rule that says
You can't start cutting back your flowers
Before they're spent now some people are going to say well. What a shame
Why would you cut down flowers before they're spent in your garden?
I will show you on my anise hyssop, which is just a few feet to my right here
I'm just going to reposition the camera. Okay what you see on this?
Is this actually just entering its bloom period it does have a few mature blooms on it
But lots and lots of little blooms are coming
So this is relatively early in its bloom cycle and you might ask
why am I so crazy as to consider staging it right now the answer for me and it's very personal right now is
that I have an event coming up in my garden in about a month and
If I let this run its natural course by the beginning of August
It will be brown and bereft of flowers and that's not the way I want to present it
but if I
Preemptively cut it now
it has plenty of time to
Recover and I should see blooms again in the four to five weeks that it's gonna take before that event
So I may not do the entire thing. But if I stage it low right now
At least in part I should have some blooms for that later time in the season
It wouldn't be a bad idea
In any case to stage half of a patch like this that you don't get all your blooms at once and then have nothing
At least if you stage some in advance, you'll have some blooms for later
Well, that should pretty much cover it on the topic of deadheading
Just remember one last thing that this obviously only works on roses that begin as rebloomers
So if you have old garden roses or one time blooming ramblers or species roses
The deadheading will provide very little benefit except maybe as a clean up to the rose
I hope I've covered it to your satisfaction. If you have any questions, please leave those in the comments below the video
I'll see if I can help. Thank you again for watching