Sacramento Digs Gardening: Tell your roses to take a break

Let rose hips form to cue your bush to take a nap. (Photos: Debbie Arrington)

What to do when your roses won't stop blooming and it's time to prune

It’s time to tell your roses: Knock it off!

November’s mostly dry and relatively warm weather coaxed bushes to just keep flowering.

Some roses just won't quit, such as this Diana, Princess of Wales hybrid tea,
still blooming in mid December.

Although I appreciate the bonus December blooms, that makes it hard to winter prune.

Roses need pruning to revitalize the bush and reset their biological clock. Otherwise, canes sprout atop canes, creating tangled messes 10 feet tall (or more) with blooms way out of reach.

You can’t smell the roses if they’re way over your head.

How do you get a rose bush to slow down and take a winter break? Allow rose hips – the rose fruit – to ripen. Instead of clipping off spent blooms, let the hips that swell at the base of each flower turn deep red-orange. That cues the plant that its work is done for this year.

After the hips mature, the bush will drop its leaves and stop pushing out fresh growth. That makes winter pruning much easier; stripping the bush of all foliage is part of the process.

When is the best time to prune?

“I usually recommend it’s a great time to prune in the Sacramento region from approximately Dec. 15 to Jan. 31 or, if really necessary, up to the first week in February,” said T.J. David, founder and curator of the World Peace Rose Garden at the state Capitol.

Several local pruning clinics and events are planned for early January, including the McKinley Park prune-athon on Jan. 4. (More on those events later.)

My annual goal is to get my roses pruned by Super Bowl Sunday; that will be Feb. 2.

Meanwhile, I’ll pick a few last bouquets – and think about making rose hip jelly.

GENERAL GARDENING

An article about gardening.

Keywords:

gardening Sacramento McKinley Park Rose Garden pruning rose hips roses World Peace Rose Garden rose pruning winter gardening blooms

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Food in My Back Yard Series

May 13: Your plants can tell you more than any calendar can

May 6: Maintain soil moisture with mulch for garden success

April 29: What's (already) wrong with my tomato plants?

April 22: Should you stock up on fertilizer? (Yes!)

April 15: Grow culinary herbs in containers

April 8: When to plant summer vegetables

April 1: Don't be fooled by these garden myths

March 25: Fertilizer tips: How to 'feed' your vegetables for healthy growth

March 18: Time to give vegetable seedlings some more space

March 11: Ways to win the fight against weeds

March 4: Potatoes from the garden

Feb. 25: Plant a fruit tree now -- for later

Feb. 18: How to squeeze more food into less space

Feb. 11: When to plant? Consider staggering your transplants

Feb. 4: Starting in seed starting

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Garden Checklist for week of May 18

Get outside early in the morning while temperatures are still cool – and get to work!

* Plant, plant, plant! It’s prime planting season in the Sacramento area. Time to set out those tomato transplants along with peppers and eggplants. Pinch off any flowers on new transplants to make them concentrate on establishing roots instead of setting premature fruit.

* Direct-seed melons, cucumbers, summer squash, corn, radishes, pumpkins and annual herbs such as basil.

* Harvest cabbage, lettuce, peas and green onions.

* In the flower garden, direct-seed sunflowers, cosmos, salvia, zinnias, marigolds, celosia and asters. Transplant seedlings for many of the same flowers.

* Plant dahlia tubers.

* Transplant petunias, marigolds and perennial flowers such as astilbe, columbine, coneflowers, coreopsis, dahlias, rudbeckia and verbena.

* Keep an eye out for slugs, snails, earwigs and aphids that want to dine on tender new growth.

* Feed summer bloomers with a balanced fertilizer.

* For continued bloom, cut off spent flowers on roses as well as other flowering plants.

* Are birds picking your fruit off trees before it’s ripe? Try hanging strips of aluminum foil on tree branches. The shiny, dangling strips help deter birds from making themselves at home.

* As spring-flowering shrubs finish blooming, give them a little pruning to shape them, removing old and dead wood. Lightly trim azaleas, fuchsias and marguerites for bushier plants.

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