by Melinda Myers
Keep your flowers blooming longer and your garden a bit tidier with deadheading. Removing faded flowers can promote repeat bloom on some plants, encourage fuller, more compact growth, and tidy up the garden.
Use a bypass hand pruner, garden snips or other dead-heading tool to remove faded flowers. Bypass tools have two sharp blades like scissors, resulting in a clean cut that closes quickly, leaving your plant looking its best. Corona Tool’s Ergocut dead header (coronatools.com) has a finger loop that provides better control and an ergonomic design for less stress on your hands and wrist.
The type of flower will influence how and where to make the cut. In general, remove the stem of faded blooms back to the first set of healthy leaves or nearby flower buds.
Remove the flower stem of salvias, speedwells (Veronicas), and snapdragons as the blooms begin to fade. Cut below the spike of flowers just above the first set of leaves or the side shoots where the new flower buds are forming.
Encourage additional blossoms and improve Shasta daisy’s appearance by removing faded flowers. Prune back just above a set of healthy leaves.
Cut the flowers of plants like Armeria and coral bells back to the base of the flower stems that arise from the foliage. This improves the appearance and encourages more blooms on some of this type of flowering perennial.
Plants like daylilies and balloon flowers require a bit different care. Remove the individual blooms as they fade if you don’t like looking at the faded flowers. Once all the individual flowers have bloomed out, you can cut the flower stem back at the base.
Removing fading flowers of fuchsia and lantana will prevent the plants from going to seed and encourage more blooms. Remove any berries that do form to keep these plants flowering throughout the growing season.
Deadheading peonies is strictly for aesthetics and won’t extend the bloom time. Remove the faded flowers or seedpods as they form. Cut just above a healthy set of leaves to keep the stems more upright and create a tidier appearance in your garden.
Prevent some flowers, like columbine, Amsonia, and Alliums from reseeding and spreading throughout the garden by removing the faded flowers. Even though it won’t promote additional blooms, it will help eliminate unwanted seedlings in next year’s garden.
Remove flowers as they appear on coleus, grown for its colorful foliage, to promote more compact growth. Late blooming, flowerless varieties and self-branching coleus hybrids reduce or eliminate time spent on this task.
Reduce time spent deadheading by including some self-cleaning, also called free-flowering plants, like impatiens, fibrous begonias, Calibrachoa, and moss rose. Lobelia, many of the newer petunias, and verbenas are also self-cleaning but may benefit from a bit of grooming. Prune back heat-stressed lobelia and verbena that get leggy and petunia stems that need to be kept in bounds.
Allow seedheads to develop on coneflowers, rudbeckias, and other plants that provide winter interest and food for the birds. And consider skipping the deadheading of late blooming perennials. This allows them to prepare for winter and form seedpods for additional winter interest.
And while you are out in the garden deadheading, pick a few flowers at their peak to enjoy in a summer bouquet indoors.
Melinda Myers has written over 20 gardening books, including the recently released Midwest Gardener’s Handbook, 2nd Edition and Small Space Gardening. She hosts The Great Courses “How to Grow Anything” instant video series and the nationally syndicated Melinda’s Garden Moment radio program. Myers is a columnist and contributing editor for Birds & Blooms magazine and was commissioned by Corona Tools for her expertise to write this article. Myers’ website is www.MelindaMyers.com.
