The end of December means that it is time to prune my roses. I use a multi-stage process when pruning my roses. The first two stages were completed yesterday and today.

I will start with a picture of what my roses looked like before I started yesterday.

The two rose bushes shown in this picture are my St. Patrick and Tropicana. You can see that there are still blooms on the roses. It is so sad to prune the roses when they still have blooms, but it is necessary to get them ready for a new season of blooms. The last blooms are a little beaten up by the wind and rain, but still beautiful in their own way.

The first stage of pruning is to basically remove all the long canes and growth and get the bush down to a manageable height.

Unfortunately, this picture did not turn out so well. Not sure what the camera was focusing on. But you can just barely make out that the bushes are much shorter, but still have a bunch of leaves on them. During the first stage it is really a challenge to break down the cuttings as small as possible so that they will fit in the yard wast container. I also have to keep compacting the cuttings so that I have room for what I prune off of seven rose bushes.

After getting the bushes cut down to a manageable size, I take a break and come back the next day for stage 2. It was really weird to back out of my garage last night and to be able to see my front door. The change is so dramatic.

This afternoon, after taking the unfocused picture above, I started the detail pruning. In this stage I cut out all the dead wood and make sure that I don’t have any canes that are growing in the wrong direction or crossing over each other. I also do some shaping to make sure that the bushes grow in the direction that I want them to. I want to make sure that they fill in nicely and also that they don’t grow into each other very much. Remember, these will be six to eight feet tall again by summer time.

Here we have the results of stage 2. I am not as aggressive as some gardeners when it comes to pruning my roses. I like to have a nice big base for new growth. That new growth will start very soon. I will most likely have leaves on the roses within three weeks, buds by the second week of February and full blooms by the end of February.

Once the leaves start opening up on the roses I will then commence with stage three of the pruning. I will then identify a few more areas of dead wood that need to be removed and may also do a bit more shaping.

I am looking forward to more beautiful roses next year. I am also thinking about a few new bushes. Maybe I will plant a few in my back yard.

Steven