It is a month later and they look fabulous! Still short to the ground but flush with leaves and new buds. Perhaps this was not such a bad idea after all! Have started my first ever batch of alfalfa tea and will feed them that this weekend. Thanks to those of you who gave advice (as opposed to making snarky comments about my husband) ;-)

I am actually trying to get a handle on how low to prune if I want my knockouts to eventually be about 4 fet tall. Can anyone help? I just cut them back to about three feet but my hunch is that from here they'll go crazy. Two feet seems so smlll compared to where I am starting from. This will be their third year. Last summer they got to be about 5 feet and that is larger than what I want right now. The first year they were in they grew pretty slowly and last year I pruned in early April to about 2 feet and they grew to about 5 feet. Should i go back to 2 feet if i want an outcome of 4 or should I go to three feet and then cut back in the summer if they are larger than I want?

Denise, Landscape roses like Knockout Roses are very vigorous growers, so you prune them to give yourself some control over them. Otherwise they can get amazingly big and start looking kind of wild. The "rules" for pruning them are not necessarily the same as they are for some other roses like hybrid teas because they are landscape shrub roses. Some people don't prune them their first year because they want to get a good idea of how the natural shape of the Knockout rose is going to progress. Some folks prune them back only every other year because they want them to be huge monsters but know they have to maintain some sort of order and control. You just have to figure out what works for you and the space you have as well as the vigor of the particular Knockout you have. Some Knockout types get larger than others and some grow more vigrously. When you prune in late winter to early spring, you are doing so in order to control the shape and size of the bush, and to keep new growth coming out near the bottom of the plant. Remember that I mentioned my mom quit pruning her roses and the base of the plants became very ugly. Well, that "ugly" is what you want to avoid. If you don't prune, then the new growth comes out higher and higher every year and the bottom of the plant looks awful. I haven't grown Knockouts, but they probably should be pruned back to the 5, 6 or 7 largest canes each spring--removing what you need to in order to maintain the shape you like and that fits in with your landscape. You always remove the oldest and woodiest canes, because as they get older they just get woodier and woodier and don't look that great. Because Knockout Roses can be very vigorous growers if planted in ideal conditions, they sometimes need "corrective" pruning in the middle of the growing season when they send out an occasional limb that just shoots out from nothing to 2 or 3 feet almost overnight and is growing in the "wrong" direction, like directly into the wall of the house or a pathway or whatever. I don't think you have to deadhead Knockout blooms though, as they are self-cleaning. A friend of mine describes the more vigorous Knockouts as taking on the appearance of a drunken spider if left too long without corrective pruning, with long legs sticking out this way and that way, and she's not the only person I've heard describe them that way. I have a couple of David Austin English Roses that get that same "drunken spider" look in the middle of the summer, especially after a big rainy spell. They just send out canes out of nowhere that go this way and that way. I prune them out as needed and don't seal the cuts. They heal over just fine on their own. I googled and found you info on "Pruning Knockout Roses" and linked it below. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Pruning Knockout Roses

Typically you prune in late winter/ early spring. As Paul Zimmerman would say, when the forsythia blooms. When I had knockouts I liked to keep them compact, so I pruned after every flush. And then really hard in the early spring. Here in the south, it would be late February. Not sure where you are located, but the forsythia rule is a good one. Whether you cut the spent blooms is up to you. I like neat, so I deadhead a lot. It's really just what you want to/ are willing to do. Knockouts are carefree by nature. You can always just do the winter prune and not worry about the rest :-) adrianne