About Basic Care

Handy Dandies

by Phil Ash

We've talked about keeping your pruning shears clean and sharp. We've talked about keeping your loppers sharp for cutting the big stuff. We've even talked about using a saw. Today we need to talk about your thumb pruners.

When you pruned your roses, you cut them back to a good-looking bud-eye that was just starting to swell with growth. Now, a couple to several weeks later, you need to get very busy with your thumb pruners.

Those buds to which you have cut are starting to explode with gorgeous green or purple foliage. Now, before the growth gets any bigger, take your thumb and/or any other combination of fingers and start breaking off the new bud growth that you don't want. Go examine one of your roses and you'll see what I mean.

There is a very good chance that the top bud on each of the canes is sprouting foliage as it was supposed to. That's what apical dominance is all about; the top bud usually grows first. But, there is lots of other activity going down that cane. Many of the bud eyes are sprouting, and some of the sprouts may be bigger and better looking than the top bud. Even at the top bud site, there may be evidence of other buds swelling and starting to sprout.

Right now, you can use your handy dandy thumb pruners to take off some of the excess buds. Pop off any excess eyes at the top bud, so only the strongest most vigorous one is left. Then go down the cane and pop off other swelling budeyes that head the wrong direction (into the center or crisscrossing other possible canes). There may be one gorgeous budeye sprout below that's better than the top bud. You could switch and prune just above it making it now the top bud. Get rid of the excess growth right now while you can readily see it.

You have to define excess. On a hybrid tea, you may want only to leave a couple buds per cane, so that all the nutrient goes into them. On a floribunda or shrub where you want twiggy growth you might leave many more budeyes.

Growth is so rapid that one day you can see exactly which budeyes to pop off, and the next you can't. Several days later the vigorous leaf growth may totally obscure the excess budeyes making it difficult to impossible to see and remove them. In the picture above, taken at the same time as the first, you can see that the leaf growth makes it difficult to see what excess budeyes must come off.

Look at it this way. Is it easier to quickly thumb the excess off? Or do you want to wait until the mature growth, all over the plant, has to be whacked back in a major effort? On top of that, you will have wasted all the water and food that went into those large canes which have to come out. Get your thumb pruners limbered up and busy now to save you lots of time and resources later.

This article was originally published in Rose Ramblings, Vol. LXXIII No. 2, February, 2000. © 2000 San Diego Rose Society, Inc.

Keywords: Planting, Disbuding, Basic