Hey again
It's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and today I want to talk to you about how to prune and train your climbing roses to
Get the best of them in the garden. In some ways
It's very similar to the things you would do with a freestanding shrub rose in other ways
It's a little bit different. I want to focus on those differences and the first difference I want to talk about is the difference between
vertical and horizontal
Stems because it signals something very different to your rose in the way they perform
So when you train them vertically like this behind me
I have a free-standing shrub rose or one that's trained as a free-standing shrub rose, and it's trained in that
Open wall shape format that we often recommend. So a lot of the stems are quite vertical
well
That sends a very strong signal to the Rose about what to do with this energy and what it does is it sends that right
to the tips of those stems and creates a couple at most
Strong flowering branches right at the top of the plant
It doesn't really send flowers down lower or along the length of the stem
And then once those are done you take a cut back you do your deadheading and then it focuses once again on creating flowers
right at the top of the stem when you train things horizontally, it does something quite different at every
Node along that stem. It creates a lateral branch that is ready to flower. And that's what you're doing with climbing roses
Let me show you how that plays out on plants in my garden
Let's look at a couple of different stems from the same plant
This is a variety called seven sisters a multi-floral Rambler and you see on this one here that this stem is quite vertical
But it has some large shoots expressing at the very top. They're actually quite far ahead
But as you move down the stem on this same chute
You see they get smaller and smaller
Until
Down at this stage. There's almost nothing happening with the shoots because it's quite
vertical now, let's have a look at a horizontal one and
This stem is laying a little more horizontal and you can see that what's happening
Is that all the way back along the stem all the way back to here all the way back here?
All the way back here
It's sending a bunch of new side shoots that all will be able to use flowers this year
So definitely the horizontal is going to end up giving you far more flowers than that vertical stem and for a climber
This is the kind of training that we're looking for
So roses produce more flowering shoots over horizontal stems, huh?
That's a pretty important piece of information
And I'm going to give you a second to digest that cuz I can imagine you have a couple of questions
first of all
When I first heard this I wondered why don't people then train their shrub roses the ones with the long arching stems
Downwards and pin them down. So they produce more blooms and the short answer is of course that they do
It's a process called pegging or pinning down your roses. They take the end of that long stem
They pin it down on the ground and of course the horizontal section then creates a lot more flowering shoots
You can't do this to every rose and not every rose seems to be well suited to that. So if you have a fairly upright
Say hybrid tea, like Elina. It just doesn't have bendy stems that are going to do that for you
And of course it flowers pretty nicely across the tops. I find also the things like Julia Child
Floribundas they do a beautiful job
if you do a regular trimming
They'll keep on blooming around the outside edge of the shrub the entire time you don't have a need to pin it down
But for those that have longer arching stems or lacks or growth like the David Austin roses
Pegging is a valid a valid strategy and it does produce more flowers
So now you have to move on to the practical questions the question of how do you choose the right stems the most?
productive stems and clear out all the other stuff your roses being growing and this is where
Pruning a climbing rose isn't much different than pruning a shrub rose or a free-standing rose
Which is there are just some rules that you follow to try to clean it out a little bit the best you can
I've done a whole video on that a post-op above but I am going to go through some of the more important
Processes here. The first of which is to start with clean sharp blades now by sharp
I mean, of course
Sharpen them before you start your pruning so you don't get those jagged edges or break the stems as you do it
damage afterwards ISM what you're after you want a clean cut that it can heal nicely from the clean part comes down to
Spraying down your tools now
Whichever tool you decide to use I use loppers like these
Most of the time so I don't have to get my hands right into the shrub
for some of the finer cuts I use hand pruners like this and
for a thicker section
I might even pull out the folding pruning saw like this. Either way, you'll want to spray it down
I spray it down with this questionnaire disinfectant people have asked me about this
I have a link on my Amazon store to quaternary disinfectants like they used in the doctor's offices or the dentists offices and
That's fine. The other way you can do it is just grab Lysol, some people use alcohol. That's fine, too
I would not use bleach that does tend to rust your blades
You give it a good spray down and the reason you give it a good spray down is to stop from transmitting
things like viruses bacteria and fungus between different roses
So if I have a collection here of a hundred different roses, I don't want to move a virus from one to the other inadvertently
Okay down to business. Do you see that mess of stems there? That's what I've got a tackle here
And this is a climbing rose called Super Dorothy. It's a sport
I think of Dorothy Perkins and you can see the mess of new stems that it's put out there
It's pretty hard to get the idea of how you should start to tackle that one thing. I will say though
I'm looking over here
And if you look outwards along this low fence that I have you can see these long
Horizontal stems that are moving and they even actually come down
as far as over here, so
That gives me a good start a good thing that I want to maintain
But I have to get rid of some of this mess in the in in the base here
You
Let's bit easier to see now, isn't it? I've moved all that
Thin outward growth from the base of the rose and but you can still see there's something like 15 or 20
Stems moving off in every direction along this low fence that I'm going to Train this rose
so I have to choose some winners and I have to choose some losers and this you go back to the basics of pruning the
First thing you're going to eliminate are those dead diseased
damaged and
Crossing stems the ones that interfere with each other
when the wind blows they rub against each other and cause damage and you do want to reduce this down to
Some degree to give everything its own little piece of real estate so that it has good air circulation around it
each stem is getting good sunlight and that
You don't have them rubbing up against each other
the nice thing of course is of course that the rose then will send all of its energy into those remaining stems and you'll have
Good strong bloom for this here. Now. I should talk real quick here about the difference between old stems and new stems
So I'm going to close up on one here and see that that one has well, that's that's woody
You can see it's like the bark is all
Sort of gnarled and developed and then there's of course
Fresher stems that you're going to see here something like this fresh green one at the front when you're done
This you'd like to have selected. I'm going to give you a number here and say eight or ten stems
Okay
but some of them should be those old ones and
Some of them should be the new ones and I call this kind of succession planning for your rose
It's true that the younger stems will eventually be the future of your rose
But those old thicker stems are strong bloomers right now
So you want to keep some of those but also keep some of the younger stems
so here's where I've gotten to you can see that there's no more small Twiggy growth in there and
Every one of these stems more or less has its own space to grow into
I'm actually not sold on this one right up front here
it's kind of coming out at an awkward angle that it does have a whole ton of
Flowering shoots on it. So I think I'm probably gonna leave it on and then just tie it up to this piece here
So to the crossbeam, so that will be fine. I think some people get into this thinking they're going to manage
Every nook and cranny of their rows I go after every one of those
Lateral inside shoots and have it just facing the exact right direction. I don't believe in that that level of
detail
For a couple of reasons. First of all, I don't have time to mess with every single
lateral and second of all
I don't have the faith that my rose will do all the things that I tell it to do
So what I do is I aim after the broad strokes the big directions
Manage the base manage the main stems and then if the laterals aren't exactly in the right direction
Then I'm not too worried about it
I'll show you how to tie it up in just a second here. But I've got one cool little detail here
Is that when I pulled on this stem here just trying to straighten it up onto the fence. What I noted is
that it has rooted and
I can pull up on here
Just like a blackberry, well sometimes root at the end of its
stem that's what this Rose has done here is
Where it laid down into that mulch
It went ahead and routed another plant. So for those of you who were wondering
Can you?
Root a rose or propagate a rose by layering. I think our answer is yes, so I'm tying on here using just
jute twine and
You can use anything you want
I'm not purist on the matter, but the one nice thing about jute twine is that it's biodegradable. So if this
This does get lost in the garden it's going to just break down
whereas if you're using things like cable ties or wire that if that goes into the garden
Then you'll have litter around your garden for a while
So admittedly Super Dorothy is an easy one to get to go horizontal
It has those thin pliable stems that are very easy to bend downwards
But also it just seems to want to grow horizontally. This one behind me is a very different character along this back archway
I'm growing Altissimo
Which tends to throw these 10 to 12-foot?
Long straight rigid stems that are very hard to bend downwards or horizontal now
You don't change your process very much
You still focus on eliminating?
dead diseased damaged crossing and even Twiggy growth from the base of the plant you select yourself a set of stems that are
both young and vigorous and old and well
Established and you give them lots of room in between the only step that changes
Is that when you get to the point where you want to bend this horizontally you have to apply a little more English?
Let me give this one a quick prune and then I'll show you how I do that
And here's a badly crossing branch, so I'll take that down low
And once it comes time for training don't be afraid to use a little bit of force
It's gonna take a bit of hand strength
but as long as I bend this
Gradually and don't snap it I think we're okay and what I'm trying to accomplish here is I hope you can see across the top
Here there are some nice red shoots coming
But all the way from here downwards every node is completely dormant
if I bend this down onto this horizontal pole and tie it down what I should start seeing is
Flowering shoots developing all the way across this stem everywhere where the angle is lower than 45 degree, right?
Thank you so much for watching today on what I do to prune and train my climbing roses for best performance
That horizontal thing is the key to it. So keep that in mind
Obviously this does not end the topic of what to do with your climbing roses because every climbing rose is a little bit different
I may make follow-up videos. I know I've got some pillar ring of roses. I'm going to do a little later in the season
So I'll make a video on that at the same time if you have any tips that you've used to get good performance out of
Your climbing roses in the garden. Love to hear those in the comments below
I'm sure our other viewers would as well and again, thank you so much for watching