Welcome to this week’s growingwisdom, and today we are going to talk a little bit about deadheading. A lot of you send me questions, you know, where do I cut? What do I cut? When do I cut? The good news is you almost cannot messed up perennial plant by dead heading it, even if you cut too much off, it is going to comeback next year. But, 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 stalks but all these other stalks are done for the year. This will not bloom anymore, you can leave it., it is not a problem if you want to leave, but I like to cut this down.
So, what I want to do is look at the stock and I will go all the way to the base with stock 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 punning sheers or in this case, I have got these nice hand 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 on the composed pile, and this will break down, and make some soil and start the whole process all over again.
Okay, so I am in front of the host to plant now, and hostess 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 look, so I am going to do the same thing we did with the daylilies. I am really going to get down all the way to the base.
Now, this particular host is 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. It takes me just literally a few seconds to get all of this out of there, and it looks much cleaner. The other reason to do this is that on the top of those stalks, you have seedpods. If you cut these down prior to the seedpods opening, it is not going to reseed itself.
It also helps for the energy of the plant to go in to the plant not into making the seeds. So, I move 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 a very top of it where it was producing the flowers. You can cut off that tops so that it is not producing seeds.
After it is 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.
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