7 Rose Growing Mistakes to AVOID)

As a primarily edible vegetable gardener, it's taken me a few seasons to get my head around growing roses. But as you can see behind me, I think I've figured it out. And I have not only this beautiful climbing rose, but seven other types of roses growing here at the Epic Homestead. So in today's video, I'm going to give you some of the biggest mistakes that beginner rose growers make and I've made so you can avoid them in your garden. These four roses are the first ones that I ever put in here at the homestead. And it brings us to the first mistake that you can make. And I certainly made, and that would be a watering mistake. Roses want a healthy amount of water. You'll notice I'm going to take my little shower nozzle and just put a trickle on it. If you don't have irrigation set up on your roses, they want to be watered almost like a tomato wants to be watered. So deep but infrequent forces those roots to go down. Remember you're going to cut these back and let them regrow many, many years in a row. And so you want nice, deep established roots and you want to water at the base like I'm doing here. Counter-intuitively every so often on a sunny, maybe windy day like today, it's a good time to come through and give it a spray on the entire plant. So I'm going to come in with like the flat side of the hose and just give it a spray. And the reason I'm doing this is I'm kind of blasting off any dirt, maybe some spider mites, anything that could impede the growth of the foliage and sort of inhibit its ability to photosynthesize. I wouldn't do that too much. And I certainly wouldn't do it on an overcast day. Man, this Cecile Brunner rose smells so good. And it brings us to a mistake. Once the rose has died, this particular flower, you could just leave it on and what'll happen is it'll produce a seed pod or a hip, a rose hip. And that's certainly fine. Better for the end of the season though, because during the season you're going to want to come through with some snips and do some deadheading. So I wouldn't deadhead this one right here and the name is exactly what it implies. When the head is dead, you take it off. So right here, I'm going to leave that one, smells amazing. This would be an example of one that is still opening up. But as I go over to, let's say right here, this isn't looking so pretty anymore. If I just touch it, it kind of vanishes. And so I'm going to come through and cut back to there so that the plant is no longer supporting this spent flower. And I don't want the rose hip right now. So I'm going to remove it. It's going to be the same for this. If you don't have snips, you can just kind of do a pluck. It tends to pop itself off at the point where it's the weakest and you're good to go. Then there's some really obvious dead ones down here that I've kind of missed, which would be like this one, that guy right there. If you're doing this on a different style of rose and you don't want to take off just the head, you can come down even further on the stem. So this is not a good example because there's obviously a ton of roses to come here, but you would come down to about a five leaf stem point and cut so that there's still some side shoots coming below the cut point. And then what you would do is allow that to grow and you'd still get some more flowers out. But it's kind of a therapeutic thing to come out to your rose patch and do a little bit of deadheading, get a little whiff along the way and just take care of your plant so that it devotes energy towards new flowers. Anytime you're planting a plant in the garden that you're going to be growing for many, many seasons, it's a perennial crop. You want to make sure that you ace when you plant it in the ground, how you plant it in the ground and where you plant it. Those are the three biggest things people get wrong with roses when they're at the time of planting. So number one, sun. I'm getting blasted by full sun right now, getting a beautiful tan. Southwest facing location here, full sun access on these roses. That is what they need. Don't put them in partial shade unless you have no other choice. Spacing. These ones are a little bit tight. These are the first roses I ever planted and I want about four feet minimum between bushes. Why? It gives them space to shape and structure. They're thorny plants. It's going to be hard if these start to grow into one another for me to accurately prune here. So these are just a touch too tight, but I'll make do with it, live and learn. And then the third mistake you can make in planting is how you actually get that root ball into the ground. And so with most roses, they're what's called a grafted rose. So there's going to be a rootstock rose below the surface and then grafted onto that or fused to that is going to be the rose that's growing above the surface of the soil. So all four of these are grafted roses. And it's really important the depth that you plant that at. There are a lot of different opinions here, but what seems to be the case is you want to plant the bud union, which is where those two join just slightly below the surface. So you protect it from frost, any sort of damage. The only problem with that with a grafted rose is that eventually that grafted rose will revert what's called reversion back to the rose that's beneath the surface of the soil, that rootstock rose. So eventually a grafted rose can kind of fail you. And the one you're trying to grow actually won't be growing anymore. But I have a few roses over here that don't have that problem. Over here I have my three prize roses in the front yard, planted directly in the ground. These are my own root roses. They're from Heirloom Roses who are the sponsor of today's video. We've worked with them in the past, love their selections. The crazy difference with these is that they're just not grafted. The roots below the surface, it's the exact same cultivar or the exact same variety as what's growing above the surface. Three varieties here, Fourth of July, gorgeous, easy on the eyes, well-named and then a green rose that is frankly something I didn't even know could exist. But the big difference here is that there is no graft point, which means that it's not going to revert to a different rose because it is only one rose. It's going to be longer lasting. The blooms tend to be more abundant and the seasonality of it, it tends to last for many more seasons. So we're super big fans of the work that Heirloom Roses does as well as the varieties they offer. So check Heirloom Roses out in the description. But besides the difference between own root and grafted, there's another mistake that a lot of beginners, including myself, make and that's just choosing the wrong type of rose in the first place. When you are growing roses or really any plant, but roses especially, you want to choose the right type for the context you're growing it in. This is a beautiful moon-shaped arbor. I'm not going to be putting a small bushing rose on it. I'm going to be putting this Cecile Bruner Climbing Rose on it. So there are three major categories of roses and then there's subcategories. It gets crazy and overwhelming even for myself. So here are the basics that you need to know. First up you have species roses. These are roses identified primarily by their species, such as Rosa rugosa, the rugosa rose, or Rosa blonda, the meadow rose. These are true wild roses, not cultivated varieties and are usually only known by their botanical names. Species roses can range from two feet to 20 feet in length, can form dense thickets and are able to self-sow their own seeds or take root along their stems to propagate themselves in the wild. Normally these form a single layered flower with four to eight petals and they only bloom once during the year. Next up, you've got old garden roses. These roses were developed before 1867. There are 22 subcategories of old garden roses, including extremely fragrant types like the damask rose, big and fluffy flowered bourbon roses, or repeat bloomers like the China rose, which my green rose is an example of. Few others, such as the Noisette category tend to be massive at up to 20 feet and need a good hard pruning session every few years to keep them in check. But why are all old garden roses from before 1867? Well, that was the year that the first hybrid tea rose was introduced. And that brings us to our final selection, the modern roses. The first hybrid tea rose, La France, was introduced that year, kicking off the realm of hybridization. By the end of the 20th century, more than 10,000 hybrid modern roses had been developed with many new classifications. And there's almost every single color you can imagine, except for blue. I don't know what it is, but roses and dahlias don't want to be blue. Modern roses tend to be repeat bloomers with huge flowers. Initially they were less fragrant than old garden roses, but after years of development, there are some very fragrant and beautiful modern roses today. So in the modern rose category, you also have many subcategories of roses, hybrid tea roses, floribundas, grandifloras, polyanthas, like my Cecile Bruner climbing rose, miniatures, mini floras, and then those shrub roses that include some hybrid species of roses, as well as the English roses. So choose the rose for the context that you're growing it in. If you want a more classic rose garden, maybe go with a hybrid tea with beautiful spacing, prune it really well. Obviously a climbing rose, Cecile Bruner goes really well up this arch, but if you're a container rose grower, you can try and own root rose, or you can even do one of those miniatures. If you choose the wrong rose, you're going to have a bad time. There is a whole host of mistakes that I think every gardener, including myself, is afraid of no matter what the plant is. And that would be the mistake of pruning incorrectly. I have this with my fruit trees. Sometimes I have it with my tomatoes. I'm sure you can relate. In roses, I think it strikes even more fear into people sometimes because it's a bit more confusing on how to properly prune roses because of how many different types that there are. So some general rules of thumb here. You have your once blooming roses and you have your repeat blooming roses. You do not want to prune your once blooming roses before they bloom for the season. Why? Of course you know why. You would be pruning off the bud that's going to produce the rose, the only rose that you get that season. So with once blooming, wait until it has bloomed and then do your prune. And with repeat blooming, you can, you just have a little bit more forgiveness cause it is going to come back. So you can do maybe a shaping prune before you get those first flowers. And the plant will still bloom over the course of the season. Now, when we take a look at my climbing rose over here, there's actually a big mistake that you can make. So with a climbing rose, down here, you have all of these canes that are coming up. These are what are called the main canes. They're coming up and they're going into this climbing trellis structure. And then they're branching off like crazy, producing all of these rose buds and all these side shoots. If you were to come through and maybe prune right down there, or prune right down there, unless you're really trying to heavy prune that rose, you're just going to be deleting an entire branch of that plant all the way up through the climbing structure, which would not be a good idea. It's kind of like kneecapping that rose. So with a climbing rose, what we tend to do is this is going to be a repeat bloomer over the course of the year. And what we'll do is we will shape it and just kind of keep the overall structure in place. So once all of these roses here bloom for the season, and we know that we're kind of getting towards the end point, we'll do a shaping prune and bring it back down to earth, so to speak. So when it is time to prune, you want to remember the three Ds, dead, diseased, damaged. You will never go wrong if you remove dead tissue, damaged tissue, or diseased tissue on a plant. So let's imagine that this one was a dead branch here. You want to look for discoloration. So brown, black, gray. Those are examples of very clear dead tissue. Red, oranges, greens. These are all colors that a healthy rose stem can be. So if we take a look here, let's just pretend this is nice and brown, and it starts getting green down here. You'll want to cut it right above the point where the tissue still looks good. And that is the successful pruning of damaged or dead tissue. You don't have to go all the way down. And in fact, that would just be removing some healthy stuff that could help this rose regrow. And really you just have to shape it as you want it to be. The one thing I would say that will help you with that shape the most is pruning to what's called an outward facing bud. So if you take a look again, back at our friendly example here, what you'll see are these leaves coming off of the stem. So about two, three months ago, these were just little buds that were facing in a particular direction off of this stem. So if I wanted to prune, what I would do is I wouldn't prune right here with this leaf shooting outwards like this, because that's kind of going into the middle of this rose. And it's making a branch that's going this way cross back to go this way over the plant, kind of ruining the structure here. What I would do is I would prune right there so that it could shoot out this way and sort of expand the size and shape of this rose out in this direction. So when you start to prune, which might be February or March, or as well at the end of the season, you want to think about what that pruning cut is going to force that plant to do. So pruning to an outside bud is a good idea. A lot of people will say prune to 45 degrees. You don't have to do that. I still do it as a good rule of thumb because the water can roll off that way. But I don't think it's as big a risk as most people say. So if you feel like doing a straight flat prune across, you can totally do that as well. I think with some of our longer growing plants in the garden, we can often forget to fertilize. These are multi-year plants. When we think of like a tomato or a pepper, it's very easy to think of fertilizing cause you, you know, you need that result, that harvest at the end of the season. But with roses sometimes easy to forget. So I will fertilize right now my climbing rose. So I'm going to move my mulch away. I'm using some Rose Tone. Man, it smells really nice underneath here. Best time to do this is actually a bit earlier than I'm doing it right now. Would have been when you're starting to see the roses leaf out again as the season starts to warm up. If you start seeing blooms, it's probably a bit on the later side. It's still not going to harm the plant, but I'm using organic granular fertilizer that's going to break down slowly over time. And I'm just going to surface disperse a little bit here. Because it's organic and granular, I don't need to worry about over fertilizing. I'll cover this back up and then I'll just throw my mulch back on top. And later on I'll come through and do a water. On in-ground planted roses that are well established, I don't think you have to fertilize like crazy, but if you're growing one of those miniatures or a container or a shrub style rose in a more constrained amount of space, then fertilizing is going to be really important because just like any other plant, we're putting out blooms, we're putting out growth. We need to give that plant more nutrients if we're growing it in a container. So roses are honestly way more fun to grow than I ever thought they would be. I frankly, when I was younger, 12 years ago when I started gardening, I thought they were like a granny plant that I wouldn't be caught dead growing. And here I have about seven or eight of them growing in the garden, probably more to come. Check out our other rose guide over here. Thanks to Heirloom Roses for sponsoring the video. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.