Should You Trim Back Plants During a Mid-Winter Thaw?
Got an email from Joanne who says, ‘since it’s going to be mild the next few days, how do you feel about trimming some of our hydrangeas, knockout roses, or rose of Sharon?’
Leave the hydrangeas and rose of Sharon alone, but you can do some light pruning this time of year on roses. Like my knockout roses that are beside my house, I trimmed those back in December. I let them go completely dormant. I put some leaves around the base for insulation as well. I didn’t trim them all the way back, I probably left 18 inches all around and then in the spring, if I want to, I can trim them tighter again before they leaf out.
And the reason I leave them a little taller, it’s because if you trim them too far back, and then we have a really hard winter, you’re gonna get stem dieback. Then sometimes the plant is hurt by the pruning if the pruning is really severe. So you want to go ahead and allow that plant to have room to die back.
Right now it’s a good time to get out any of the dead, I mean like any dead sticks. It’s really easy to see, especially with roses. You’ll see they kind of turn this cruddy brown. And if you’re not sure, just take the edge of the pruner blade and scratch the cane and if the cane is not green underneath, then that’s dead. And then you move further down the cane, you start at the tips and just work back. If you find a spot that’s still green go ahead and trim that off there, and the plant will reproduce growth from below that.
You’re gonna be trimming it again below that anyway for shaping, first thing in the spring. Then giving it a good dose of fertilizer to wake it up now. We’re not doing that now. We’re not gonna put any fertilizer down for a couple months yet, but once we get into that end of March/early April time frame, then we’ll talk about fertilizing and using a good granular like the Rohr’s all season, which will feed it for the entire season.
If you’re gonna go out there and make the effort to fertilize, why not use a product that lasts for the whole year instead of something that lasts four to six weeks? The cost of the product is the same. It’s very cost effective to use the Rohr’s product once and know that you’re taking care of it for the entire season, instead of using other products and having to reapply them, and let’s face it, a lot of times.
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