Rose Pruning Secrets: The Complete Guide | Garden with Marta

Hey guys, it's Marta. Welcome to my March garden. Today I'll be pruning my roses. I wanted to share all of my tips and tricks when pruning them and to tell you what kind of results you can get doing that in different ways. Let's begin. You will probably notice something strange in this border. These piles of compost are here and they are waiting to be mulched in a perfect way. But I asked a few strongmen to bring all of those compost and put them there and I will be just doing that after I prune my roses. So first of all this border I will tell you what to do first when pruning them. When I assess my roses after the winter I try to go with the 3D method. So I go with dead, diseased, damaged and those stems are supposed to be pruned out. So that will be you will definitely see it. They will be brown, white inside, definitely dry. These ones we remove like whole and even we cut them at the base. Then we have the stems that are diseased and with those you have to be very careful if the rose is overall healthy. So you'll see green stems and a few of them look diseased. So they have different color, they have diseased tissue and if you have a lot green remove them and don't even think about it. But sometimes we come in the winter and we see that most of the stems do not look perfect. So what can you do? You can remove those and cut really low but sometimes I leave them for the spring to observe how they will perform. Sometimes you will see that they will even have the buds, then they will have the leaves and the leaves will go dry. So I will remove that in the spring later but sometimes they don't look that good but they will bloom for me. They will probably die next year but I will get some flowers. So this is your decision. Sometimes when you see like a really disease is starting maybe it's better to prune it out but it is your decision. You can do whatever you want. If I have a lot of green I don't do it but if there are just three stems and all of them look... I just try to leave the best looking ones. Next up we have damaged stems. How do rose stems damage? Usually you will have stems that are crossing and when they are crossing they are rubbing on one another and as roses have thorns they will damage the tissue. If we have the damaged tissue this is like a gateway to all the bad things that can happen to a rose. So any kind of pathogens can get into the stem and cause some havoc. So when we have stems crossing you should prune one of them so they are not rubbing on one another and overall when you look at the rose you should have some space inside of the rose so the air can get in. There is nice airflow so we won't get any pathogens. If the rose is wet it will have a lot of leaves. The air can get in and can dry the plant and then no problems will happen. Okay guys let's look at one of my English roses. This is Queen of Sweden. One of my favorite roses because it overwinters in Poland very well. Very few stems look not that good. They are all alive but some of them don't look as green. This is a very thick rose so I will be removing all of them that do not look perfect green. As you can see this rose was pruned in the fall. I do that because I don't want the wind rocking because when the rose is very tall when the wind blows it will be rocking the the rose and when it's rocking the rose it is rocking the roots and when the roots are not in place it can also be bad for your rose. So I always try to prune the tallest of them and now I will be doing the prune that I should. So I will be removing all of the stems that do not look perfect green and then I prune above a bud around half a centimeter and when I prune it I do it like this. I do not do a slant cut. I've been following David Austin roses and their advice and they are saying it doesn't really matter. I think they've pruned I think millions of roses so they know how to do it so I always stick to their advice. So this is a rose that is a low growing rose. This is not a tall one. The flowers will be this high and I've seen this phenomenon with roses like that that when I prune them lower so I in the spring I go and I prune really hard they are growing higher and if I prune them lightly I just leave pencil thick stems they will stay very compact. So I'm trying if I have all the stems that are healthy I'm trying to prune them higher which seems counterintuitive but somehow this is how it works. Okay let's leave those roses and let's talk about climbing roses what to do to get the most flowers. This is a climbing rose called Laguna. This is a very deep pink beautiful rose very healthy and I will show you in a second how to prune it but I get a lot of questions from people that have a young climbing rose and how to train them how to prune them. You don't prune them in the first or even second year depending on how it grows. You are letting the main stems this is like one of the main stems you let it grow but you have to train it when you train it to go horizontally all of the buds that are sleeping buds they will emerge and you will have a lot of lateral stems and those are the stems that bloom. So we are by training it going like this even 45 degrees and then try bending the stem so all of them wake up and then when you will have those lateral stems you will be pruning them and pruning them in spring you have to prune just above the second or first bud and just prune like that and from all of those you will get flowers so you'll have flushes of beautiful blooms. As you can see above me there are some stems that are going wild I will be training them and securing them to the structure also trying to train them horizontally so maybe they will also have some woken up buds that will bloom for me even more. I think it will look beautiful because this rose is really nice but it's always trying to block this passage with her flowers so I want them really there. I've pruned some of the things that were shading this spot so I think now it will be getting more sun and we probably can expect more flowers on that side. But I don't prune all of my climbing roses in the spring some of them were pruned in the fall let's go and see which ones. I did some tests in previous years and I stopped pruning my once flowering roses like Bobby James or Super Dorothy and I've had great results with their blooming so this year I want to try the same with Constance Spry so I did the main pruning after it has flowered so late summer early fall and I've pruned most of the stems. Now I will be just doing the sanitary pruning so I will just remove the leaves the some of the dead stems and I will tie back those that are too long and we'll see how it will bloom for me this year. This is a test and I'm really curious how it will go but with my Super Dorothy and with my Bobby James this late summer early early fall pruning has been very beneficial for their blooming so I'm really curious how this will go. So here are some of my other English roses and this is they reminded me that I wanted to tell you about the height that you're pruning your roses. When I listen to David Austin what they recommend and they always say to prune back your roses by a third to a half and I used to do it by half because my roses grow really high and tall so I've been pruning by half but this year I wanted to do some tests and a lot of my roses have been pruned really lightly. If I had healthy stems I pruned them by a third and I want to see what results it will bring. I'm really curious what are your results and how do you prune and which one which types of pruning do you prefer and with which types of roses of course. Most of my roses are English roses so I really need to get the best results and I know that the really thick framework with nice stems that are pencil thick are the ones that will hold the flowers best but we'll see the different heights this year and how it will work. The crocuses are so beautiful I really need to get on my knees and start making this compost look really nice. I really like mulching with compost because my plants are really happy when I do it and when it's black it looks beautiful but this is for the next week also we'll be scarifying the lawn so a lot of jobs to be done in the coming days but I can't wait to see the garden ready for spring. I'm really curious about your experiences with roses how do you prune them if some of the things I do you always also do not always but also do let me know in the comments and maybe you have some tips that I did not say and they will be valuable to other viewers. Let them know in the comments please. Okay guys if you enjoyed today's video please give it a thumbs up, consider subscribing and we'll see you in the next one on Saturday. Bye!