I am Dave Epstein, this is Growing Wisdom. I’ve got a rake and I’m standing in the snow, late winter or early spring, there’s a lot you can do in the garden and we’re going to start pruning some roses. These three things we want to do today. We’re going to prune, we’re going to clean the base of the plant and then I’ll give it a little bit of fertilizer, so that when it starts to grow, it’s really nice and strong.
I’m pruning a shrub rose, I could prune my shrub rose as down to about twelve inches or so, and what I’m looking for are those little red nodes and in the buds that we’re going to bloom here in a little while. It’s pretty easy to just start cutting back. You look for one of those nice little nodes, those are the buds for next year, and you continue to cut back to the height that you want to make the plant. If I didn’t prune it that would stop growing from the very top and it’s going to be too large for this space. So I prune mine fairly aggressively , you also want to remove any dead canes, those are the canes that are completely brown, there’s no growth, we move those completely all the way to the base of the plant.
Step two is I want to remove all the dead leaves from around the plant. This is very important. If you have roses, they get black spot or other diseases, a lot of the diseased pores will live in the dead leaves. If you leave them, when it rains, the rain will splash up those pores onto the plant. And step number three, just a little bit of organic fertilizer around the base of the plant, according to directions, and you’ll have beautiful roses all summer long.
For Growing Wisdom, I’m Dave Epstein.