How to Prepare Your Roses For Winter

hi i'm judy penner and i am the director of loose park and the head rosarian at the laura conyers smith municipal rose garden and i'm here today to show you how to put your roses to bed for the winter now typically i would prune in around thanksgiving and do my mulching around thanksgiving so i people always ask me that question and i let them know that because you really are trying to keep the cold in the ground as opposed to keeping the ground warm what's going on is when you get that thaw freeze effect that happens you tend to lose roses that way it can cause damage to the grafts that are on the roses so let's get started here i do want to talk about some sanitation things i always spray with alcohol all my equipment so that i keep any kind of virus or disease that might be on one bush from spreading to another bush so this is important even in the fall when you're doing your pruning i also use a felco pruners which is a nice pruner that is a number two pruner i just like it then i also have a larger lopper in case i have some really big canes and then i have a smaller lopper because sometimes the longer one i can't get the good leverage and the little short lopper works a little better but right now i think with this particular rose i'm going to be able to just use my falco pruner when i'm pruning i prune the rose so that from the base of the rose to the top of my prune is 24 inches so two feet so when you make a cut then you're gonna be at about 24 inches so it's good if you get a ruler or a yardstick and just get out there when you first start to make your cut now if you go a little higher or a little lower it's not going to be a problem but that's just a general area so i make my cuts and when i make these cuts you don't have to look at where you're making the cut you just are taking the height away from your rose bush and i have another rose bush growing into this so i'm also going to cut that away because when winter comes you're going to have an issue with the wind blowing and if a bush is growing into another bush and it's rubbing the canes that can cause some physical damage and then that's a site for disease to enter so you really want to make sure that you're cutting any canes that are rubbing against each other away okay so now i have cut all of this down but i'm looking in here and i don't know if you can get in here but there is a cane that has really just died it had damage down at the bottom so i'm going to need a larger loppers to get in here and make a cut down to the base and i had to take a little bit of the wood glue but this is this is a cane and it just had some dye back if you have any kind of disease or die back going on with your bush please cut that out as well because you don't want that to overwinter and when you do this you should use some wood glue so once you've made your cuts then you just go and put your wood glue on each of your cuts and then this will help keep anything from going down into the cane like a cane bore or other insects or problems that might arise another thing that you can do to just clean up is pull all the leaves off of the rose bush and this again remember this is around thanksgiving time so you just gently pull down on your rose bush and you can pull the leaves off and your cane will look bare like that what this does is it really helps in terms of keeping the disease spores that come with black spot off of your roses so it not only that it makes cleanup next spring a whole lot easier so your rose is going to look a little naked and i'm just going to do these two canes right here so that you can see what that is going to look like once it's once it's done that also allows you to see into your rose bush a little better so you can see what's really going on and you can also see a little better if canes are rubbing against each other and that type of thing once that's done then i take my rake and i rake out any debris that is around the bush [Music] so now that the bush is completely defoliated it's a good opportunity for you to look at the structure of the bush because you can see this has some really nice canes you've got one two three four five six seven eight eight really nice sized canes but one thing that's concerning to me is right in this area here i have this really strong healthy cane coming out this direction but if you notice this cane right here and this cane these two are touching and that is really going to cause some physical damage so the people always ask what what cane do i choose well in this particular case i this cane is kind of growing into this these canes over here and it's also smaller than this cane so i'm going to go ahead and take this cane right here and i'll take it all the way down and snip it like that and you can almost hear the rose say ah we're not rubbing against each other anymore so that is what i do on that and there you are you pretty much have your rose ready for mulching again i do want to stress really clean up the beds like all of the leaves any kind of leaf that's down there really needs to be pulled out because it can harbor all of those black spot spores so you want to get all that out of there one thing that you should also do spray the ground before you put the mulch down and i spray with a contact fungicide manzat is what i use or mancozeb but you know you can find any kind of fungicide that's good for roses make sure it's labeled for roses what that does is if you do have spores of black spot spores down in the ground that will that contact spray will kill them and then you've cleaned all this up but you've put your fresh mulch on and you're giving your rose the best chance to be healthy for the next spring so once that's all cleaned up and looks lovely and tidy then you come over you get your mulch and what i have been using this year and last year is a compost and i've been very happy with the results that i get from using compost as a mulch it keeps the moisture in it also helps with the weeding the weed problem but the benefit of it is that any fertilizers that i put into the garden really get into the garden with the wood mulch i was having a little bit of a problem of the fertilizer eating up the or having the fertilizer being eaten up by the wood mulch so i i do like the compost and i use a shovel because i used to use a pitchfork with the mulch and it worked great but with this it's a finer texture so i mulch and i dump it right in the center of the rose and i go about six to eight inches and what you're doing is again keeping the cold in the ground and you're also to keep that freezing thawing situation from happening in the winter time so let's get our yard stick out again and see that's probably that is about actually in in spots it's about 12 inches yeah maybe more like nine but it will settle don't worry about that if this settles it's not a problem it'll it'll be fine if if it looks like it's coming away from your rose bush which it shouldn't but if it does you can always add more compost to it the other thing you can use and i've seen this done in minnesota is where they take chicken wire and put it around the entire rose bed and put leaves in it so that is a possibility i do warn on that is that you've got a lot of cleanup in the spring and you've got a lot to do in the spring so but it is an economical way to mulch your roses and if you just have a few it would be pretty simple to do that a lot of people in the midwest feel like they can't grow roses because they lose them due to winter kill well after looking at this video you'll know that you can grow roses by just doing a few simple steps

Channel: JUDY PENNER

Views: 36,769

Rating: 4.8076925 out of 5

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Id: siaRqMDghTc

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 13 2020