Deadheading Flowers

You don’t need tie dye and dancing bears to be a deadhead in your own backyard. Deadheading is an important task for any gardener who wants to see multiple blooms in the flower garden.

You don’t need tie dye and dancing bears to be a deadhead in your own backyard. Deadheading is an important task for any gardener who wants to see multiple blooms in the flower garden.

Outside of Grateful Dead concerts, deadheading is the process of removing dead flower heads from plants in the garden. Since a flower’s main purpose in life is to distribute seed, removal of the flower encourages the plant to produce another flower to make sure it has seeds to leave behind when the season ends.

Although deadheading is a tedious task, the effort can do two things for your garden. First, removal of the dead flowers gives your garden a instant clean look. Second, most perennial flowers (and some annuals) will bloom again if the dead flower is removed. This lets you get your money’s worth from your flowers by extending the blooming season.

You can deadhead flowers with your hands or with pruning shears. Tall flowering plants benefit from cutting the stem near the bottom of the plant. Flower bushes may be pruned all across instead of removing individual flowers, and the plant usually responds with new growth, including flowers.

Just like pruning shrubs, it’s hard to kill a plant by deadheading. Take comfort in knowing that the worst that could happen is the plant gets a bad haircut. It will grow back.