Cleaning the Roses

The weather this weekend was sunny and clear and the snow even melted back so rather than stay indoors and clean the bathroom I decided to do some yard work.  There's one chore I've been putting off throughout the summer.  Cleaning out the rose bushes.  During the early summer our roses looked like this.

Large shrubs full of dark pink roses, they are really quite lovely but also severely overgrown.  The worst part is that they are harbouring wild raspberry canes.

If you look at the top of this photo you'll notice the curly canes sticking out of the bush.  Those are wild raspberry canes.  It's a lot easier to see them now that the leaves have fallen so it was a good time to get in there and do some pruning.  The raspberries are easy to identify as the canes are a bright brown and lack the large thorns of the roses.

Can you spot the raspberry canes among the roses?

But what to cut the canes with?  The reason they've probably taken hold there is it's impossible to get into the rose bushes without scratching ones body parts to pieces.  I need something with a long handle.  oh no, here we go again, another tool from that store that shalt not be named.  I seem to be obsessing about tools lately.

This handy thing is a raspberry cane cutter.  How perfect.  It has a telescoping handle for getting into hard to reach places and has a hooked blade on the end. (my apologies for the slightly fuzzy photo)

Just hook the blade around the cane and give it a good swift tug.

An hour later I had a pile of raspberry canes and a much nicer looking bunch of roses.  There's still plenty of work to be done pruning roses but that can be done in the spring.  I'm just happy I finally got around to this job as I've been putting it off for so long.  Who would have thought I'd be here at the end of November cleaning out rose bushes!  Just proves there's always something that can be done in the garden.