[Music Playing]
Welcome to this week’s growing wisdom and today we are going to talk a little bit about deadheading. One of you sent me questions— where do I cut? What do I cut? When do I cut? The good news is, you almost cannot mess up a perennial plant by deadheading it. Even if you cut too much off, it is going to come back next year.
Let us go through a few more typical types of plants and we will show you how to deadhead them. Okay, so what I have got here is a daylily and the daylily plant is basically done. There are two buds left on one stalk but all these other stalks are done for the year. These will not bloom anymore. You can leave it. It is not a problem if you wanted to leave it but I like to cut these down. What I want to do is I look at the stalk and I go all the way to the base with the stalk, literally where the stalk meets the plant. And then I get in there and I cut that right to the base and that is done.
You want your pruning shears or in this case I have got this nice had trimmers to be sharp and clean. You do not want to be spreading any diseases from plant to plant as you are doing this. I can put this in the compost pile and this will break down and make some soil and start the whole process all over again.
So, okay, in front of a hosta plant now and hostas throw up those big tall flowers, these are definitely done. You can tell they are done. There is no more flowering going on. I do not like the way this looks so I am going to do the same thing we did with the daylilies. I am literally going to get down all the way to the base. Now this particular hostas fairly thick, you go all the way right to the bottom where it meets the plant as far down as you can get and just cut this back. Takes me just literally a few seconds to get all of these out of there and it looks much cleaner. The other reason to do this is that on the tops of those stalks, you have seed pods. If you cut this down prior to the seed pods opening, it is not going to reseed itself. It also helps with the energy of the plant to go in to the plant not in to making the seeds.
So now I am in front of the Asiatic lilies and here you do not want to deadhead this to the ground. The reason being is that the leaves are actually still bringing food in to that bulb for next year. But what you can do is just at the very top of that where it was producing the flowers you can cut off that top so that this is not producing seeds. After it has been exposed to a frost, then I will cut it right back to the ground.
We want you to come back every week here at growingwisdom.com for all of our tips.
[Music Playing]
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services