How to prolong rose bloom: summer pruning technique
While many gardeners are familiar with spring and winter pruning, summer pruning is often overlooked. SSPDaily has collected tips from experienced gardeners on why, when and how to prune roses in the summer months.
Why prune roses in summer
Pruning roses in the summer months helps:
- First, regular summer pruning keeps the plant looking neat and prevents it from drying out.
- Secondly, it promotes abundant flowering by redirecting essential nutrients to healthy stems, buds and leaves.
In addition, pruning helps prevent the bush from thickening, which can lead to fungal diseases. In addition, pinching the upper shoots in July stimulates the development of new buds, which leads to more vigorous growth.
How to prune roses to ensure continuous flowering
For effective summer pruning, you need to use the right tools, including pruning shears, garden shears, a small saw, and a knife. Before pruning, the tools should be disinfected with a solution of potassium permanganate or copper sulfate to prevent infection from entering the plant.
The pruning process itself consists of the following simple steps:
- Clean the soil under the rose from leaves and debris.
- Cut off wild and excessive sprouts of light green color, as well as those that grow incorrectly.
- Treat all the cuts with varnish to protect the plant.
Cut exactly above the growth buds at a 45-degree angle with a 1-cm margin. Too high a cut can lead to drying out of the stem, and the wrong angle can lead to moisture accumulation, which will provoke rotting.
It is important not to delay pruning blooming roses in the summer. Inexperienced gardeners may be tempted to get rid of the buds only, but this approach weakens the stems and reduces their ability to hold their blooms for a long time.
Pruning climbing roses in summer
The technique of pruning roses depends on their type. For example, in polyanthus varieties, it is necessary to completely remove the single-stemmed stems at the base, leaving only healthy and undamaged branches.
Hybrid tea roses should be pruned in early summer to 3-4 leaves from the bottom, and in July and August - only flower buds. In polyanthus and miniature roses, weakened shoots should be removed completely, and the remaining ones should be shortened by a third. For stem roses, wilted and slightly damaged stems should be cut off, leaving 5-6 live internodes.
