Pruning Garden ROSES for more Abundant Beautiful Blooms // Growing roses for cut flowers

Hello everyone and welcome back to Crowley House Flower Farm. This week we are going to be pruning some David Austin roses. I have about 20 of them up close to the house and that's where I'm just going to start. We've had some absolutely beautiful weather here on the farm. A little bit cloudy but the sun kind of pops in and out. There have been like days where we're in the 60s and it is the beginning of February so we have been kind of warm this year even though we had that cold spell about a week ago but I kind of have this feeling you know any gardener might do this but you kind of get this gut feeling that things are going to start popping early this year. So we're already seeing some things like our daffodils, anemones, ranunculus, you know all those things kind of pushing forward a little bit earlier than we would normally so just a couple weeks early. So I wanted to get going on these roses and partly because these roses are sheltered you can kind of see behind me these beautiful ponderosa pines they kind of shelter these roses so I'm going to start here and then we'll move as we get going with this project because there's a big project on our farm. We have over 700 roses and some of the roses we're moving out this year we're just not going to be farming that many roses so I'm moving them on and out to other places we'll give them away to people. So I just thought I would start here and we have this gorgeous day even though it looks there's all these clouds in the background. So I'm just going to take you through some of the steps that I do to prune roses and kind of my thoughts on it and we will just see how far we get. I'm hoping to get all 20 of them done this is a big chore. I'll show you the tools that I have to start with today. So I have my well-worn gloves I have some pruners here which I really like for the smaller things and then I have bigger ones as well just because my hands don't always work super well. The only thing I forgot was a rake so I'm going to go get a rake and then Jason's going to bring me the four-wheeler with the little trailer on it so that I can throw the clippings in the back. I also have some rose toned food for them and I'm going to give them a little loving of that at the end. So I found my trusty rake in the barn and so I'm going to take that back over and get started. So we have been busy cleaning up all these garden beds and putting down fresh compost and I'm just kind of working my way back to where these roses are. So I've got five of the Lynchfield angels and I've got five of the Queen of Sweden's behind me that I'm going to be just pruning up taking there's so many weeds underneath them you guys this is ridiculous but I am going to just start here and work my way continue working my way that way um on to the next set of David Austen's. These here are probably three years old and they've done really really well they're I planted them too close together so again it's something I'm probably going to have to move but the the ones the David Austen's that are closer to the house are probably oh I got those when I first moved here so over 12 years old so they are very well established beautiful roses. So with any rose you kind of want to start off by assessing what type of rose it is is it a bush rose or is it just you know kind of your standard you know stemmed rose that comes up so with mine mine are just kind of your standard David Austen garden rose and so I kind of know how to cut it. I'll do some other videos on different types of roses and how to cut it like do you want to shear do you want to go in and remove stems as most gardeners and especially when you're new at gardening you can get intimidated by roses I think I think that's the one thing that intimidates me but I've learned over the years to be less scared of them I guess because they're they come back over and over and I've made mistakes in pruning them and they still look lovely come summer and so I've just learned not to be so afraid I I literally just go in and whack them back. We have been known to use a chainsaw to do the initial whack so just because we have so many of them you come through and you just take that one third to one quarter off the top and if you want them to be a little bit more robust you're going to cut a little bit harder so we cut in the way to use for floral design so we're looking to push blooms and not so much the shape of the rose anyways these roses up towards the house I am being a little more careful about how I cut them because I want them to look lovely they're more of a garden type style even though we use a lot of for floral design so I'm going to go ahead and start with my queen of sweden queen of sweden's kind of fun she's a beauty she's on the cover of david austin 2024 catalog this year and it's really kind of interesting and the reason I like it is because it's got a little bit more of an upright stem to it so it's not so like I'm going to be doing lynchfield angel and that one's a little bit more splayed like this so it's kind of fun to use different roses in different scenarios in your garden so if you needed something along a fence line or something that's very straight and narrow queen of sweden would be amazing oh she's so pretty kind of this like beautiful pink color it's got these ruffles on the inside and then almost like this cup that kind of kind of embraces it so lovely really nice long straight stems as well so for floral designing these these two roses that I'm doing now are probably one of the more popular requested ones that I have so I'm going to start with queen of sweden and then go from there what I'm going to do is just my initial whack job I'm going to take them down by you know they're up to my waist now so I'm going to take them down below the hip basically I'm going to go through and just kind of whack them back you can kind of see the ones that get a little more sun are taller and more robust and the ones towards the back are not as tall so you can I'll show you the comparison so sun has a lot to do with how well your rose is growing so I'm going to have to move some of the ones in the back over here anyways I'm going to show you this because it's kind of cool so you can tell the ones down here much taller and bushier and then easily come down this way look how puny this little guy is so these will be moving out just moving to a different area to a different garden but you can kind of see even the structure of them is a lot less I guess so this one has one two three four five six seven canes on it and then you come over here to the little more wimpy one come over here to this one and it's one two three four and then there's one five but it's not great even four is not great okay so I'm going to get cutting here take my initial whack off so all I'm doing is kind of when I made my first cut I kind of gauged that as far as my one third off the plant and then I just kind of eyeball it and kind of cut from there okay so I had to just jump inside and fix my clippers they kept sticking I don't know if you ever have that happen but it was really frustrating so basically what I'm doing is whacking it back to one level and then I'm going to clean up all those big branches and then we're going to go in and fine-tune them it just helps to just keep it a little more I guess the job quicker for me so underneath this we have quite a bit of like seeded verbena it was like I have a bed of it right next door to it and so it just kind of self-seeded over so I'm also pulling out some of that because that just goes abundant throughout the farm okay so I'm back to my job got my clippers going again and um yeah it's coming really fast so I'm not even worrying about where I'm cutting I'm just chopping away at the length that I need it and then then we'll go in and fine-tune it right now it's just literally getting off the mess so I'm not even caring too much about what I'm doing here so that takes part of the you know the hard part about I guess cutting roses out if you just don't think about it you just whack away just go for it it's kind of fun okay so I'm done with the Queen of Sweden got those the initial cut done I'm gonna head on to the Lynchfield Angels and I'm gonna do the same thing they're a little bit broader they're a little more vigorous rose and so there's a lot more stems to cut so it'll take me a little bit longer I think but I'm just gonna shear off the top and then I'll start fine-tuning I did clean my pruners between the roses you don't always have to do that but I like to do it because it kind of prevents disease and that kind of thing when I was a kid we had a rose garden my father would plant a rose every time a child was born and so I kind of have this fascination with roses mine I think was a Mr. Lincoln which was a red rose very traditional looking type and so I kind of I remember as a kid just loving to hang out with the rose garden it wasn't very big at the time but so roses have this stately I think feel to a garden or they just add that classic feel or charm to the garden you know you see a lot of times in movies and things like that where you know they have these beautiful gardens with the rose and it's always like the camera is always like focused on this beautiful rambling rose and it just kind of catches your breath you know you just like oh my god that's gorgeous I want something like that and I think you know especially with the David Austin roses they just kind of capture that that feel that is so romantic maybe that's what it is about roses they're just so romantic and there is this element of the feeling that they are hard to grow uh scary to grow because you're afraid you're gonna do something wrong you know all the things that can go wrong with roses anyways I feel like you know just over my years of growing roses I used to have that fear and like I said now I'm just like walking away and not caring so much and they do beautiful I'm sure in other parts of the country or world you know different climates like I know that if you're in a colder climate you have to plant the rose you know in a certain way you want to bury it a little bit deeper and then you want to mulch it you know in the winter and some people have bug issues or like we we get aphids and things like that our biggest issue is a Japanese beetle the aphid and thrip and so for those what we like to do in a natural approach and we will use like beneficial insects lacewings or you'll see them all over and then planting kind of diversely so having flowers that are you know pollinator friendly close by your roses and things like that will really help bring in those bugs that do eat like the thrip and that kind of thing for aphids are really easy I just take my thumb and just kind of kind of wipe them off if it's just starting and the buds are very little and I can just do it really quickly you can also use just regular dish soap and water and spray it on or even spraying your bushes off which if you live in a climate that has like some more issues with humidity sometimes that's not the best thing to do just because you can then introduce things like powdery mildew black spot that kind of disease so we do live in a wet climate generally lately it hasn't been so much like that we have our wet season which is now and then we have our dry season which is in the summertime and so like last year the roses did amazing no hardly any black spot I could just literally actually I didn't even spray a fungicide for that we just had beautiful roses without doing anything to them it was just amazing not not every year we'll have that so we hardly had any issues with bugs or anything last year this year probably be completely different but that being said everybody's climates different everybody's gardens different you can have a microclimate within the city or in the country or you know it's individual but those are all things that I'm like always watching for when I'm looking at my roses and any bug issues that we do have and I think because we do have kind of a diverse garden especially with all the cut flowers that we grow we just tend not to have too many problems Pacific Northwest is known for growing beautiful roses as well we got some amazing rose growers here amazing rose gardens as well those are always fun to go see but I need to get back to work because these roses are not going to take care of themselves okay guys so we've got the initial cut done on both of the roses and you can kind of see this one is the Lynchfield Angel and you will see how it kind of has more of a vase type shape to it kind of edged out over here is the Queen of Sweden and you can see how much more upright it is I love that so it just makes it a little bit harder to get in with your pruners and kind of cut in here I'm going to try and show you what we're doing here and why I'm selecting what I'm selecting so we're going to start with this Queen of Sweden here and you can kind of see how this this branch here is kind of dead and gross nothing's really crossing but you can see over here this one's really close together so we'll probably select one of those my ideal goal is to get at least six to eight of these stems coming up when I'm done pruning so you also want to take off anything that's really weak and spindly like less than a pencil size so this branch obviously is not a great one to keep so this is also a wound on one of the branches here so I'm going to take this one completely out to the ground I need my other gloppers for it though so I'm going to go grab those and probably take this one as well which is just really close to this really nice sturdy one and this one also has a little bit of disease at the top roses are possibly one of the oldest flowers believed to originate from central asia fossils of roses have been found to be dated all the way back to about 35 million years ago the oldest living rose is about 1000 years old and is growing on the wall of the cathedral of hildensheim and bermondy rose petals have microscopic perfume glands on their lower petals these are responsible for producing their beautiful scent did you know that each rose color has a different meaning for example red roses tend to represent love and passion whereas yellow roses might inspire a feeling of warmth and comfort so I've got all of the roses cut back and so now my job is to go in and fine-tune with just weeding and pulling out any debris that's underneath each rose then I'll be laying down my fertilizer and then some compost over the top and it should look amazing when it's done I love that I've gone from one end of the garden to the other and just piecing off a little bit at a time partly because I don't know as you age your hands start to hurt and if you're you know the the things you need to do though to help with that is just make sure that your tremors are very sharp before you get started and then just chunk out little projects like this at a time so I think I'm just going to stop at the 10 roses and I'm going to do the other roses tomorrow and let my hands just kind of rest because that's a lot to then go in and weed and do a lot of this so I'm just taking it easy I'm listening to my body and that's the most important part when you're gardening too is just to listen to your body and chunk it out into little pieces not try and do too much you know if I had the crew here we'd be doing all of them but we that's going to be next week we'll do that so for now I want to enjoy this process of cleaning up roses and it really is an art form you know you just kind of get lost in your own thoughts as you kind of clip out and prune out all the little pieces so I'm excited to see the finish looked as my weed cleanup what I have is my Haas tool it's like kind of like a skinnier weeder I really really like this one I'll link it below it's just fine enough to kind of get in really close to the edge and then I've got just like my it's kind of like a hoary hoary but uh just a spade basically that's you know good to get the big roots out so I'm just going to go along and try and get as much as I can out I also have my knee pad just you know to cushion the kneeling as I go along but it should make pretty quick tend to it and it's a lot of work but it'll keep you in shape or it will put you out of shape if phone calls it feels like today but I'm almost at the end I'm just going to add some of my rose tone around it's about a cup and a quarter per and I'm just going to put it around the base and then I'm going to put in some of the compost I just went and shoveled it up I'm going to put it down and call it a night you know gardening is a labor of love I tell you it is and um you have to do all this hard work to get the beautiful show in spring which is exciting and I think that's what spurs us on I don't know about you maybe um in the comments below let me know what if you have a favorite David Austin rose or a new rose that you're putting in this year or if you are intimidated like I am even every year when I come to tackle the roses I still have this little inside and and then once I get going I forget about it it's all good anyways let me know if you you experience that I don't know also if you are interested we do have a patreon I'm going to link that below we would love to have you tag along if you feel like you know you want to be a part of our family here at Crowley house we'd love to have you also give a big thumbs up and I like and we will be seeing you next week in the next video and I'm just all eyeballing this it's not perfect but I'm gonna go ahead and put that layer of mulch in and just kind of run my fingers around and get this worked in a little bit like I said I'm putting this first just because we are going to have some rain I don't want it to run off and this will help it kind of soak in over the next couple of months okay that job is done I'm gonna wheel down here and start here good so I wanted to give you a before and after look just to kind of see where we came from more for myself because you forget it's taken most the afternoon to do this project so but it's looking so good don't you think anyways here is a before and after so if you remember we started with tons of weeds all those verbenas were just rooted in there so I just worked on getting those out and clearing all the rest of weeds winter time is the best time to really get a jump on the weeds that'll save you so much time in spring if you just kind of scuff through using my little hand tools using that little forked thing that I got from Haas tools which has been wonderful for getting around some of those harder spots to get into but anyways I think it looks so good so rewarding to have that fresh compost down all the weeds gone for a while and then just the fresh little green tips of the roses coming up and I think they're already budding out you guys we're pretty warm here so it's it's about 60 degrees right now I'm heading in Jason's making a I think a taco soup of some sort anyways I hope you all are doing fantastic and just loving planning the gardens or even able to get out in your gardens let me know like I said down in the comments below we would love to hear from you and until next time much success in all you do and grow we'll be seeing you shortly back here at Crowley house very soon bye