5 easy tips to grow roses and propagate from cuttings, with Harkness Roses | The RHS

[Music] Welcome to the Harkness Roses Nursery.  This is where all the magic happens. I'm   Francesca. And I'm Phillip. Today we're going  to be showing you how we propagate roses and   how to best look after them in your garden. And  this is Maple who looks after them for us as well.   Thank you. Number one, we'd always say picking the  right location in your garden is key, so making   sure that there's enough space so it's wide enough  and also deep enough for the roots to go down.   Secondly, it's about making sure that the ground  is ready for your roses so we always suggest doing   a really good mulch in the spring. You can  use a well-rotted manure or even the compost   you've made in your own compost bin. Thirdly, we  always say make sure your rose has got at least   as a minimum four hours of light a day. They  prefer more but they will cope with four hours.   Another really important thing for roses is  pruning. There are two times of the year that we   do recommend that you prune, the first one being  an autumn prune which tends to be a lighter prune   and is most important for people that have quite  windy or exposed gardens to prevent wind-rock.   The most important one though is in the spring and  this is what we call a hard prune, so we recommend   cutting them down to about here. This just really  helps the roses to come back good and strong   the next year. Another really important thing is  disease prevention just like human beings when we   get stressed we're more likely to get ill so make  sure your roses are well watered and well fed.   Another way to prevent disease is making sure  that you pick a good disease-resistant variety.   Another really important thing to do  in the summertime when your roses are   flowering is making sure you're deadheading  throughout the season. It helps the rose put   energy into opening up these buds so  you've got lots of beautiful flowers. One of the things we have been doing is producing  our rose plants from cuttings and traditionally   they're drafted in the field and we're using  the cuttings for building up numbers of our   new varieties such as these ones over here. And as  you can see from this tray, we've got 24 cuttings   in this tray, we've got 24 living plants. The way  we do this is it's very simple but it does require   a lot of control. These cuttings were taken about  five weeks ago and they're all beautifully rooted,   a nice root ball there ready for potting on  and the reason we're doing this as I say is   the speed of building up numbers. And so  the cuttings we take a snip off a plant   at this stage just before it flowers and then  we cut off the waste and then we have one,   two, three, four cuttings and very simply we  put them in one of these little plant cells and   in good compost and we leave them there. But it's  not quite that simple because you do have to have   the right temperature, the right light regime,  the right water regime, the right humidity. If you   want to do cuttings in your garden there's a much  much easier way and the best time to do it is late   September. You want to get a stem which is nice  and ripe and has flowered and it needs to be at   least 20 centimetres and 30 is plenty. You snip it  off at the bottom and you snip it off at the top.   You remove the bottom one, two, three, four, five  leaves and you'll notice I just pulled those off   and I counted to five but is about half the  length of the stem you then take the thorns   off the section where the leaves have come off,  and you will apply some rooting hormone that can   be a powder or a gel to the stem and that's  when we need to get a pot and some compost   and you want a compost that drains fairly well and  you have your pot, you fill it up with compost and   you put your cutting in the compost to the level  of the lowest leaf and you do this once you go   back to your plant you take a second one and  a third one and if you put three of them in   one pot the likelihood is that either one or two  will live and they'll be quite happy. If you just   do one you'll end up with a pot with nothing.  And you do this in late September, October.   The pot goes outside and I recommend that you bury  it in the garden halfway it stops it blowing over,   it retains moisture and the cuttings  will sit there over winter and by April,   early May when you just pot out of the ground  you'll look and you'll see it's got roots there.   The mistake most people make is that when they've  seen the roots underneath they think that's good   and they leave it but it will start shooting and  if you let it shoot from the top it will continue   to shoot from the top and be a spindly plant once  it's rooted and you start to see a shoot coming   that means that the plant is drawing moisture  and food out of the compost then cut it back so   that only I don't know five centimetres left that  will make it shoot from the base and it will make   the shoot stronger, it'll make the plants stronger  and it will make you, the gardener, much happier. If you have any questions about  your roses, why don't you come   find us at one of the RHS Shows.  Maybe we'll see you there. [Music]

Channel: RHS - Royal Horticultural Society

Views: 130,815

Keywords: gardening, advice, horticulture, grow your own, grow food, vegetables, flowers, bulbs, garden, soil, compost, bulb, flower, plant, leaf, greenery, tree, trees, royal horticultural society, RHS, Hyde Hall, Harlow Carr, Rosemoor, Bridgewater, Wisley, GYO, gardener

Id: hHI-lVYGbt4

Length: 6min 11sec (371 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 29 2023