How to Grow Roses From Planting to Pruning

Hey everybody, how's it going? My name is Steven and I'm the head gardener and assistant curator here at the Huntington Rose Garden. Our rose garden contains over 2,500 different roses and 1,400 different varieties. And we're gonna be talking about everything roses today from what rose you should buy in the nursery, what it should look like, all of our secret recipes for our fertilizers, and a lot of tips and tricks for deadheading, pruning, watering, and a couple of other things. So let's get started. So when I get to the nursery and I'm looking for my rose, one of the first things that I look at is for healthy green foliage. I'm not seeing any wilted or any dried leaves. A lot of times what people don't realize when you go to a nursery is that you can actually check the root ball of the plant that you're buying. The roots here are a little bit bound and that's what's called root bound. Typically, you don't wanna buy a plant that looks like that from a nursery. This one isn't the worst, but if there was a better one, I would definitely choose it. Another thing that I like to look out for with roses is I would choose a rose that doesn't already have blooms. The blooms already signify that this is at the end of its life cycle. So if you do have to end up buying a rose that already has blooms on it, I personally would go ahead and just cut those blooms off. Now, it's not gonna feel good because you want immediate beauty, you want those cut flowers as soon as you get home. But trust me, when you cut them off and they grow back, they're gonna be bigger and more beautiful than the ones that were already on the plant. So we've got our rose home. It looks good, the roots are fine, and we're ready to pot it up. Here's the tools that you're gonna need in order to successfully do that. Firstly, I like to have my leather gloves, my hand pruners that are sharpened. I use a hand trowel as well, a good watering can. And finally, we'll wanna hit it with a little bit of fertilizer. Now, this is a mixture of soil, some compost, and a little bit of perlite. It's about halfway filled in the pot. And what I'm gonna do is the same way that we checked our roots in the nursery, I'm gonna go ahead and empty this pot again. So what happens when you have a plant that's a little bit root-bound? What you can do is what they call training the roots. You essentially just wanna massage it. And the intensity of the massage is gonna depend on how root-bound the roots are. So this is gonna grow a lot better than when the roots are actually wrapping around the plant. What you want to make sure when you're potting a rose is that the top of the soil line of the rose matches with this kind of last line, the last line of the lid in the pot. I'll go ahead and dig a little hole. And I like to kind of put it in and measure it. And you can put it in and see if you need more soil to make sure that this root ball is at the top of the line. And then once it's in there, your soil line is level, you wanna do what's called backfilling. Backfilling is essentially putting that soil and filling in the gaps that you made when you pulled out the plant or when you dug out the hole. And you just kind of pour it in as you go around. So I like to sort it in, make sure I'm keeping it firm as I'm spreading the soil around. So I think this looks pretty good. Typically what you wanna do next is fertilize. And we're gonna get into our fertilizer a little bit later, but you do wanna make sure that you either add a little bit of fertilizer before you put the rose into the pot, or you can sprinkle it on the outside. If you haven't watered a lot of plants before, you wanna make sure that you water to where you see it dripping through. You'll actually wanna do this twice. Water until it drips through to the bottom of the pot, which means that there's good drainage, let it rest for a little bit, and then water it again to make sure that your soil is extremely moist. Finally, I mentioned earlier that I prefer roses that don't have any blooms on them. You wanna make sure that the plant has a lot of energy stored up so that it can produce strong new blooms instead of sending energy to these ones that are gonna die in a few days anyway. If you want to save any buds that haven't bloomed yet, you can do so. Since these are so close, you can save these, or you can cut them off, either way, up to you. I know this is painful for some of you, but trust me, it's for the plant, and it's good for the plant. And this is ideally what I'd want my rose to look like after I get it from a nursery, I get it home, and I get it in a pot. So the next question is, how do we take care of it? And we'll get into that in the next section. Roses need a couple of things. They need a lot of sunlight, they need a lot of water, and they also need a lot of food. We fertilize maybe our foliar, we do maybe about three times a year, and our granular fertilizer we use maybe about three to four times a year, depending on the performance of the roses. There's a couple of things that we have here to make our secret sauce. The first one is a fertilizer called Verde. The next one that we add to our secret sauce is something called Jumpstart. Next one that we use is seaweed extract. The last two, which are my favorite, this one is called Orca. And then finally, this one is our secret, secret sauce, which we just started adding to our recipe a couple of months ago. This is called HB-101. It's a product out of Japan. We've seen really, really good effects with these, so we're gonna add this to our foliar spray. So now that we've got our Dexter's Lab on, you wanna make sure that you drench it. I like to spray it to the point where I see water dripping down into the soil. Now, we will have these measurements available online if you have any further questions on this. Now we're gonna get into pest control and disease management, which is a really important topic to cover. One thing that we use here is horticultural soap, which is essentially just dish soap. The good thing about this soap also is that it doesn't kill any beneficial insects like ladybugs or praying mantises. Now, with fungal diseases and infections, a lot of fungal diseases need moisture in order to thrive and succeed. Climate-wise, a lot of these fungal infections will clear themselves up automatically because in Southern California, we don't have humid weather for too long. Couple tips is if you see any areas that have fungal infections, just cut them off. What you wanna make sure in between each cut is that you wipe your blade with a 70% isopropyl alcohol solution. And also, if you're cutting, you wanna make sure that you are removing any of that dead cuttings from the bottom of the rose because if it rains, those fungal spores can splash up back onto the plant and reinfect your plant. All right, so our roses are now planted. They're thriving, they're fertilized. We have some beautiful blooms, but they're starting to fade, so we need a few tools in order to make sure that we can deadhead them. You'll need your pruners, your hand pruners. You'll need some gauntlet gloves that are gonna cover your wrists. You can also have a pair of leather gloves that are just gonna be a little bit more mobile, a sharpener to make sure that your tool is sharp and giving accurate cuts. We also might need a expanded pruner, which will allow you to get a little bit deeper in the rose bushes. The first thing that you wanna look for are any blooms that are going to be on their way out or spent. So I like to do a little tap test, and I'll find a rose or a bloom that looks like it's on its way out, like this one, and I'll just gently hit it. And you see that a lot of these blooms are falling off, so this one isn't really gonna last too much longer. You can hit these and see that they're a little bit more durable. This one's probably not gonna have any that falls off because it's still in good condition. So we know that we want to go ahead and deadhead this one at least. Of course, you wanna make sure that you put on your gloves to protect yourself so you don't get hurt. The traditional form of deadheading calls for very specific cuts at very specific places on the rose. So if you're more in a more temperate climate where there's an actual winter, spring, summer, fall, what you want to do is look for the first five-leaflet leaf. A basic anatomy of a rose, this whole thing is called a leaf. Each individual leaf is called a leaflet. So you usually wanna cut below either the first five or the first seven-leaflet. So we have our cut-and-hold pruners. We see our first five-leaflet leaf, and we're gonna cut all the way down to the next leaflet, and we wanna cut it at about a quarter inch above at a 45-degree angle, like so. And the reason why you do that is, depending on the angle, if it was going to an angle towards the bud, that water can actually seep down into that bud and cause a lot of fungal infections and diseases. Now, here in Southern California, again, we have a Mediterranean climate, so we can be a little bit more liberal with our cuts. We can cut a lot lower, and because we don't have that humid climate, we don't necessarily have to cut at a 45-degree angle to make sure that water doesn't seep towards the bud. We can just cut and move along. One of the most important parts about maintaining your roses is pruning your roses. Pruning, for us, usually happens the beginning of the year, usually in early January. We want to make sure that we are cutting the rose down so that it can rebloom a lot healthier in the spring. Some of the tools that you need in order to prune your hand pruners, a hand saw, especially if you're cutting through dead wood, and something like this. Make sure the blade is sharp. You're also gonna need a pair of loppers. They give you a little bit of extra leverage so that you can cut through wood or kind of tough material a lot easier versus your hand pruners. And then, again, you're gonna need your gauntlet gloves. I like using my leather for accuracy, but with pruning, a lot of times, you're gonna be going deep in the rose, so you want to make sure that you protect your wrists. One thing that I use, you don't have to use this, it's kind of pricey, but it's pretty cool, is a motorized electric pruner. Once you turn it on, it shows how many cuts that you have left. And you hold down the trigger, and then, essentially, you can just cut your rose. And this cuts through really thick, really dead wood pretty easily. Only thing is you want to make sure you don't get your finger caught in there because there's no coming back from that. So these you have to be careful with, but they're not necessary. So one of the first steps that we do when we're pruning our roses here at the Huntington, we de-leaf them. When you de-leaf, what you want to do is, you see the leaf here? You just want to pull downwards and let that snap off. The question is, why don't we just use our pruners and cut them off like this? So if you look at your leaflet here, and when you pull it off, if you look at the bud that's growing under it, there's a part of the plant called a stipule. If that stipule doesn't rip off when it rains, it can, again, collect water and kill that bud before it even has a chance to grow. You want to make sure when you're de-leafing a rose to pull them off. So now our rose is in a good condition and ready to prune. The main things that we're looking for when pruning a rose is we're looking for anything that is dead, deranged, or damaged. Any stalks or stems that are dead, deranged, or damaged. I'm going to take my pruners and just start chopping. This is a very intense and emotional process for a lot of people, because they feel like they are hurting and killing the plant but trust me, roses will be fine. They're a lot less delicate than people give them credit for. If you come across anything that's a little bit too thick for your hand pruners to cut, again, you can use your loppers. This isn't too big, but you can kind of see an example if I wanted to cut like a thicker stalk like that, I can kind of chop it off. So after we get it reduced maybe by about half, the next thing that I like to do when pruning is to cut out anything that is crossing. When these cross, it doesn't allow for good airflow to go throughout the rose. And now when you don't have good airflow, especially if it's not spaced correctly or there's a lot of crossing going on, it can cause a lot more fungal infections because it's not getting a lot of air. When you look at the rose, you'll see each area has a little bud on the stem. So if you see a bud on this side, kind of coming this way, you know that the stem is going to come out like this. Ideally for hybrid tea roses, you want to maintain a vase shape. So when you cut it, you want to make sure you're cutting it to a bud that's pointing outside. So that way it'll grow like this instead of a bud that's pointing inside, which will grow like this and cause more crossing and cause a lot less airflow for the rose. You know, each cut that you make doesn't have to be extremely specific to that regard, but as much as you can try to remember to cut towards an outward facing bud. So we're going to cut off everything that's dead, deranged or damaged. Now, a lot of times you'll find that you don't know what the next cut is to make. What I do is I make the most obvious cut. And usually after you make that obvious cut, the next cut will actually show itself. And now I wouldn't have been able to see these cuts if I had all the foliage on, if I had, you know, all the deadwood on, there's no way I've been able to see these cuts. I like to mentally justify each cut, right? Like, so why did I cut here? Because this is too small. Why did I cut here? Because it's crossing. Why did I cut here? Because it's a woody and it's not going to grow anything. That's my personal method. And it kind of gives me a little bit more confidence to know that I'm cutting it correctly. The rose is not going to look like it's ever going to regrow again after you prune it, but trust me, it is going to grow back stronger and healthier than before. So from purchasing your rose in the nursery to pruning it at the end of the season, we've covered pretty much everything that you need to get started growing your rose at home. If you enjoyed this video, make sure that you like and subscribe, leave a comment if you have any questions and we'll do our best to get back to you and answer them. Thanks for watching.