Deadheading flowers - Why And How To Deadhead Spent Blooms

Deadheading, cutting off spent flower blooms, is necessary to not only keep the garden or landscape looking tidy, but to also encourage new blooms from plants that would otherwise be done blooming for the season.

Plants produce flowers as part of their reproductive cycle. If their flowers are allowed to make seed, their lifecycle is finished and they will quite making blooms. If their flowers are not allowed to go to seed, they will generally send out more blooms until they’re able to make seed.

Keeping your flowering plants in a reproductive cycle by deadheading is such a simple way to keep color and life in your garden for an extended period throughout the season. Some Perennials will even give you an entire second bloom at the end of the season that may last well through the Fall. Many types of Roses will do this.

Another reason for deadheading is to prevent certain perennials from going to seed. For one, you may not want your plants spreading outside their designated area. Left to seed and one gust of wind and you could have an infestation. Also, seeds cross pollinated like this usually don’t reproduce the same strain as the parent plant. If left unchecked, your prize beauties will eventually be choked out by a mix of undesirable unrecognized offspring of the parent plant.

Another reason for deadheading is that it helps keep your plants healthy and vigorous. Remember, they’re trying to reproduce and are channeling energy. A lot of the plants energy goes to making seeds. So the energy that would otherwise be used for producing seed will be used for more growth and flowering blooms.

Because there are so many different perennials with different leaf and plant structures, it’s difficult to put deadheading methods in a nutshell. However, depending on the types of plants you use and your reasons for pruning, there are different ways to go about it.

Cutting off individual flowers as soon as they start to fade is simple and most common with most plant types regardless of mass, density, clusters, or size. However, some plant types that produce masses of blooms in mounds or clusters over the entire plant may take too much time to cut each individual flower. And if you’re pruning to prevent seeding, it would require a lot of attention.

If clusters or masses of blooms are growing on individual branched stems, you can cut back entire sections of faded flowers to the next branching and force more new branches with new blooms. This will also help promote new blooms on lower branches.

In some instances of mass blooming perennials, cutting back the entire plant is the most efficient method. The plants themselves will come back just fine. You may even get an entire second blooming after a few weeks.

Once again, deadheading will help keep your garden or landscaping looking clean and neat while at the same time keeping more color longer into the season.

Written by Steve Boulden. Steve is the creator of The Landscape Design Site which offers diy landscaping ideas, plans, pictures, and advice. Visit his site at www.the-landscape-design-site.com.

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