HOW I KEEP MY ROSES BLOOMING ALL SUMMER

Hi everyone, welcome back to our YouTube channel. I hope you can hear me because I'm not mic'd up or anything because just on the spur of the moment I was walking through our rose beds here and they're just absolutely beautiful this year. I'm taking absolutely no credit for that, I think it's down to the weather, but because they're so incredible and are flowering their little socks off, I'm going to end up with a lot of deadheading to do as you can see behind me because I don't need my roses for anything this week. So I've cut a lot of roses for the house and given some to friends and family but now I need to deadhead these roses to keep them flowering so I thought that's such a shame, before I do that let's share them with you lot on YouTube. So I'm going to run you through the roses now and talk to you about each different variety and the positives and negatives that I've found with growing these roses. So before I start I'll talk to you about the age of these roses, so these two beds here behind me I planted in the November of 2021 and these were the first roses that I got and then those two beds over there I planted in the autumn of 2023 so they're a few years younger. All the roses I got bare root from David Austin roses, a little bit pricey aren't they roses but they've been doing really really well in this field. In my previous site where I was in the walled garden I couldn't grow roses at all because the soil was really sand and it didn't have a lot of nutrients in it and the roses just used to suffer a lot of pests and diseases, well the few roses that I tried to grow there anyway used to and they were quite weedy and and just weren't happy in general so one of the joys of having heavy clear soil in this field is that the roses really like it and they particularly hit their stride this year like I say which I am actually putting down to the weather and nothing that I've particularly done but first I'll show you the varieties in case you might want to grow some roses yourself. So we'll start down here this is Desdemona, I pruned her quite harshly this winter because it's never done incredibly well for me by comparison to the other roses but this year she's put on loads of flowers and you can see there consistently I'm getting three to four blooms per stem and that's how the blooms start in a really soft like ultra soft blush pink and doesn't deal amazingly well with the weather this one and I would say that Desdemona has the shortest vase life out of the roses that I've got but she does have a really soft nice perfume so that one there is Desdemona. This absolute stunner here is called Vanessa Bell and it's always been the healthiest of my roses, it's always been the tallest of my roses consistently so that's got nothing to do with the weather. So these plants now are standing at a height of around about 1.5 meters, so she flowers in this absolutely gorgeous buttermilk yellow flower and then that fades to cream and you get multiple clusters of flowers on each stem and look at that hardly any thorns I mean basically what three thorns on that one stem there so not a lot of cleaning off to do not a nasty one on your fingers yeah Vanessa Bell absolutely lovely. Next up this gorgeous gorgeous one here is Sweet Juliet stunning such a nice sort of soft peachy pink colour this one has a few more thorns on its stem down there but the thorns are quite small so not massively dangerous to the fingers so Sweet Juliet is absolutely lovely scented hardly any thorns her stems vary quite a lot so some of the stems you're getting three flower heads there but you can see that one there's got a cluster of blooms at the top of it yeah she's hit a stride this year as Sweet Juliet and they fade the flowers fade down to that so I've got so much deadheading to do. This one down here used to be one of my favourites this is Roald Dahl it looks quite apricotty on one but it sometimes is slightly more peach in colour there it is they're looking slightly more peach I really like Roald Dahl because I do like the colour and I like the amount of petals in the flower but I think I've over liked it because I've used it a lot over the last few years and I've probably been a bit too heavy-handed with how much I've cut off of the plant when it's been in flower so this year it doesn't look as healthy as some of the other varieties so I'm going to ease off on the Roald Dahl this year. This absolute stunner here is probably the best rose for cut flowers if you can only get one rose in your garden or growing space I recommend this one this is Queen of Sweden and as you can see there I've got a few shrubs of it and it is covered in flowers very rarely gets pest or disease and most importantly more or less thornless flowers nice and tall so these rose bushes so these rose bushes here now are flowering at about 1.5 meters so a similar height to the Vanessa Bell slightly fewer flower buds on each stem but absolutely gorgeous okay so this is now this is a rose that I really want to love um this is Darcy Bustle I like it because it's that sort of like plummy red purple sort of shade that just makes me want to eat it but she's never been the healthiest rose in this field to be honest gets quite a lot of pest and disease that being said this year her leaves look fairly clean thus far and she is putting up some nice healthy new growth but she's really short because she's always poorly I might give her one more year to see if she hits a stride but yeah definitely one of the weaker of varieties that I grow but still a lovely colour this is one for the growers who might be growing for wedding floristry and the colour tone will definitely make you swoon this is Emily Bronte it's one of my newer roses so she's now flowering at around a meter tall um multiple flower heads per stem and again fairly thornless looking really healthy at the minute nice glossy leaves no signs of any nasties at the minute the one of my newer varieties a rose that I think is described perfectly in its name this is Tranquility so you can see they're fairly big flowers on this one and a nice ruffle to the petals once they open out so that is one they're fully open kind of reminds me of a giant zinnia thorns on this variety are quite large but there aren't many of them and really good long strong stems there doesn't have a perfume this one I really like the petals that's Tranquility now this rose kind of makes me laugh this is called Lock Inver and it got sent by mistake actually because I wouldn't have ordered it because I know I keep going on about the thorn issue on roses but look at them I mean it's just treacherous and the roses are a pretty colour but it's really not worth the risk to your fingers to be using it in floristry and I think it's probably going to get moved to my home garden one to avoid Lock Inver this rose here is absolutely stunning at the minute this is Lady of Shallot all the shrubs are just covered in flowers as you can see there and it is one of the larger blooms that I grow and she can be a little bit thorny but I particularly enjoy the sort of two-tone colour effect on her petals she never has a problem with pest or disease she goes for every year produces quite a lot of flowers admittedly a lot more this year but if you want an apricot soft orange rose I really like Lady of Shallot now this is a lovely rose this is Constant Gardener and the roses are absolutely gorgeous you can see I've got a bit of a thing for this sort of like peachy tone in any flower but particularly roses but I would say it's definitely not doing as well as Lady of Shallot and it's starting to get signs of pests and disease damage and it's got aphids on it there as well so I'm yet to be convinced that its variety is as strong as some of the others that I grow but absolutely lovely flowers finally this big fella here this is Champagne Moments which is a nice soft again very wedding market sort of colour flower to it huge big flowers seems quite happy lots of blooms on it I'm not as tall yet but that's probably because it's one of my newer roses but look at them how's that for a thorn quite thorny this one but I would say might be worth it just for the colour tone and those lovely ivory flowers now I better get on and do some deadheading the beady eyed people amongst you might have noticed there's been a costume change that's not a fashion statement that's because last night when I was filming and really enjoying the roses I lost track of time and I forgot about picking my son up so I had to whizz into town and pick him up I should say at this point no children were harmed in the making of that part of the video and he was 16 and he had just been to the gym so he was quite safe um and I was only five minutes late these things happen at this time of year so I'm now going to get on and start to prune my roses before it gets too hot it's already quite warm now um I'm going to get on and get all these roses pruned and then we're going to give them a feed which will replenish all the efforts and nutrients they've been using to produce this first flush of flowers so that we're going to get another flush later in the season around about four to six weeks to flush up with some new growth again so not that long at all really um and we'll get sporadic blooms throughout that period because there are still some buds on these that are still to open but everything that's flowering and starting to drop today I'm going to take off so what you're looking for when it comes to pruning roses is anything that is about to drop its petals like that there wants to come off and then leaving any of the buds that are left on it because they're just going to open and look lovely but you can see on this one here basically all of those flowers now you can see that one there's just dropping its petals everywhere they're spent basically they're finished so with this stem here I would be taking off the whole section you see you can see there it's got lots of branches with lots of flower heads on I wouldn't just snip down like I would if I was prolonging flowering like that and prune it in that way because nothing else good is going to happen at this point here so with this stem of rose I'm actually going to take it back and cut all of that off because a good hard prune like that is going to produce a lot stronger new growth coming up and the stronger new growth will have stronger stems for your next flush of flowers whereas if I just pruned out these little sections here you would have got really wispy sappy stems coming up from it and they wouldn't have been that good as cut flowers so although that looks quite harsh this is also the way that I cut earlier as I should say and we'll be probably looking at them later in the season that'll do the plant a lot more good than just taking a couple of buds off the top so this one as well that flower's more or less gone so right back down to there so if you've got plenty of buds on just lightly prune them and enjoy the flowers for a bit longer but if the flower buds have completely gone take it back down to a good healthy bud joint and prune off there and you'll see that that's when you'll get a really strong second or even third flush on your roses there we go roses post pruning now you can see I've still actually got some flowers on here that's because on some stems all that had gone over was a couple of flowers so I've just taken those flower buds out but you can see here in other areas I've actually been maybe a little bit more severe some people would say and I've taken out any stems like this where all the flowers were basically finished on it and you can see that I've put the height of the rose bush actually down in areas by about 30 centimeters and now I know that looks really harsh but what that's allowed the rose bush to do now what that's done is allowed imagine my hand is the breeze a lot more air circulation around the rose itself now air circulation is brilliant particularly for roses it's really important because a lot of roses can suffer from fungal infections so rust and mildew and things like that and the better the air circulation that you allow around your plants the less likely it is that they're going to suffer in that way so after it's had its first flush obviously the plant's gone put all of its energy into producing these wonderful roses and that's taken a lot from the plant so imagine if you've sort of just run a marathon then you've exerted a lot of energy so that's when sort of athletes would be trying to put the nutrients that their body has exerted back into it so we treat the plants in the same way so we've pruned back to increase air circulation we've taken off all the spent flower buds that would have been sapping energy from the plant because after the flowers bloom the plant would be then putting energy if we allowed it to produce a seed pod now we don't want it to spend all its energy doing that because we'd quite like it to produce us some more roses so we've taken all that stress off the plant we've increased air circulation and this evening because there's no point in me doing it now because it's too hot this evening as the sun settles i'm going to be foliar feeding these plants with a spray of liquid seaweed and that's just going to give them a little boost to reward them for all their efforts in the flowers and hopefully give them exactly what they need so that we get a lovely second flush of flowers pretty soon and that's it that is how i try and keep my roses happy this is my personal opinion as everything is on this channel so if you've got any hints and tips that you want to share with other people about how you keep your roses happy then please do so in the comments it'd be lovely to read some other hints and tips if you've enjoyed the video please like and subscribe it really does just help me keep the channel going and be able to create content for you guys so if you do that that would be really kind and i'll see you next time bye