Do you prune your roses regulary every spring?

Excellent, so you do the plants a lot of good. Shortening the shoots makes sense for several reasons. Roses that are not trimmed become senile. Over time, they become less and less vital and willing to bloom, the shoots become long and leafless - regular pruning prevents this and helps supports a vigerous growth, strong shoots and beautiful flowers. Pruning roses also makes other maintenance tasks easier: because the crown is thinned out, weeding, fertilizing and watering are easier. In addition, the leaves dry more easily, which makes fungal attack less likely.

The best time for pruning

Occasionally, in addition to pruning in spring, it is also recommended to do it in fall. This is done to avoid possible frost damage and also to prevent the rose from losing vitality due to the cold weather. However, this damage is not considered problematic today, so pruning in fall is not necessary. Nevertheless, some plants grow so luxuriantly that it is difficult to apply winter protection. In this case, you can trim these shoots a little - but this shaping pruning should be as gentle as possible: shorten the shoots only slightly.

In case of roses that bloom more often, summer pruning can also be useful to further increase the plant's growth. To do this, thoroughly inspect the plant in the warm season for already faded flowers. You can cut these back to the next mature five-leaf, see below for more...

Basic rules and the right tools

Are you worried that you might do something wrong when pruning your roses as an amateur gardener, or in the worst case even injure the plant? The worry is unjustified, because in general roses are quite robust in this respect. Through the depth of cut you can control the growth strength of the new shoots - do not be timid!

However, you should still follow some important basic rules:

• The right time for pruning is spring, when the forsythia have fully bloomed in your region.
• As a rule of thumb, light pruning will result in weak shoots, and intensive pruning will result in strong shoots.
• Basically, remove very weak shoots at the base and cut back any frostbitten, diseased shoots down to the healthy wood. Always cut the shoots about 0.5 centimeters slightly diagonally above one bud.
• Remove wild shoots so that the branch ring is also removed.
• A sharp and clean pair of rose scissors is recommended as a cutting tool. Especially rather blunt tools can bruise the shoots and thus injure them.