What does it mean to deadhead flowers?
Deadheading is the operation that involves removing those dead and wilted flowers of a plant. This is necessary if you want the flowers to keep blooming throughout the entire season. Dead flowers suffocate the plant, as they still consume nutrients and don’t allow it to grow. Therefore, you cannot have other fresh flowers if the wilted ones are still hanging around.Why should you deadhead flowers?
The first reason is purely aesthetic. After they die, flowers get an unpleasant aspect. They start wilting, turn an ugly brown color, and make the entire plant look bad. Therefore, deadheading is essential for a pretty garden. Moreover, it helps the plant get bushier and have more flowers. Usually, removing a flower before it reaches maturity helps the plant grow even more blooms. Therefore, if you deadhead it, its blooms will continue growing throughout the entire season. This applies to perennials, as well as to annuals. This is a great idea to prolong the latter’s otherwise short life. Deadheading makes plants healthier, too. When a flower disappears from a plant’s stem, it no longer has to use that energy that was meant for it. Instead, it directs it back into the stem, towards the leaves and the root, so it gets sturdier. In the end, the last advantage is the fact that deadheading prevents self-sowing. This is quite a bad thing, as most plants spread their seeds aggressively, and can easily turn invasive. By deadheading, you prevent the formation of those seeds in the first place. Make sure you know which plants you want to allow to self-sow, to avoid future trouble.What flowers to deadhead
Before proceeding to cut flowers all over your garden, you should know whose blooms will get sturdier if you perform some deadheading. The operation is perfect for more exotic flowers, like bleeding hearts, delphinium, or lupine, but there are many other flowers you can try it on. Salvia and lavender, for instance, thrive really well after deadheading. They are bushy plants with dozens of flowers, and removing the wilted ones will make way for many others. You can easily fit foxgloves and heliotropes in the same category. The operation is good for regular plants with single flowers, like roses, coneflowers, or cosmos.How to deadhead flowers
If you want to learn how to deadhead flowers, you should be familiar with all the practices that are involved in the process. There are three techniques you can use, and you should choose them based on the plants you are going to deadhead.Pruning
Pruning means cutting parts of the plant with the help of special gardening tools, such as scissors or snips. By using these tools, you remove those dead flowers that prevent your plant from growing. Before doing the operation, study the plant carefully. If there are some flower buds growing lower on the step, and they still haven’t opened yet, cut off those flowers from the top of the stem. If all flowers on the stem have already bloomed, you can cut those at the base.Pinching
Other plants have less sturdy flowers which grow in pretty soft and mild blooms. Therefore, you no longer need to cut them off with special tools, as pinching them with your fingers is more than enough. This operation is quick, and you can do it any time, without any special preparation. It comes out as really handy for those flowers that need a ‘dramatic’ deadheading.Shearing
This is the last technique to know when learning how to deadhead a plant. This is a bit more radical, and is ideal for those plans with many flowers crowded against each other. Since it’s more difficult to remove one single bloom from such flowery bushes, the first thing you should do is wait until more of the plants start wilting. Then, you can simply shear about one third of this bushy bloom. In the process, you might remove some flowers that were healthy. This will affect the initial production of future blooms, but the plant will easily recover. Soon afterwards, it will actually look better than it did at the beginning of the season. You can do this operation about two or three times during a season, so your blooms will only get better.Can Deadheading Flowers Help Control and Prevent Weed Growth?
Deadheading flowers can indeed help control and prevent weed growth. By removing the faded blooms, you prevent the flowers from going to seed and spreading their seeds all over the garden. This reduces the chances of weeds germinating and taking over. Deadheading is one of the effective natural weed control methods that can maintain the beauty of your garden.
I can’t seem to get a direct answer on how to deadhead a hanging basket of petunias. Can you help me find directions?
Hi there,
The correct way of deadheading your petunias is by clipping off the blooms once they turn brown and cut the stems directly above the next set of leaves.