Guide to Deadheading

Deadheading demystified! Join Debbie, Spring Hill's resident gardening expert as she reveals the secrets to deadheading your favorite flowering plants - hostas, zinnias, rose and more! Discover the essential deadheading techniques and ways to promote new blooms so your garden remains filled with color and beauty right through the season!

"Hi, I'm Debbie with Spring Hill and today we're going to take the mystery out of deadheading. Now deadheading is exactly how it sounds - it's just taking off the old blooms in the middle of your blooming season to encourage new blooms. Now, that's different from pruning, which we'll cover in a separate video. Now, there are a few different ways to deadhead. As you see, next to me, this Hosta has one shoot of blooms coming up, and, as you can see, it's all bloomed out. So, what you would do is take this entire stalk off. You see, I'm not removing much in the way of foliage, just taking off the bloom. What that's going to do is give you a nice, healthy looking plant and get it ready for its next flush of blooms. Now, daylilies are just the same as Hostas. All you want to do, is take out that main shoot. But with daylilies, you don't even need your pruners. So, here, hang on to these for a second, would you? Thanks. All you're going to do, is take these old, brown stalks and just yank them right up. And, by the way, while you're deadheading your daylilies, it's also a good time to take out some of this dead foliage underneath the plant. That will keep it looking really nice. Now Asiatic lilies are going to be different from daylilies. Now, you'll notice on the blooming stalk that there's foliage all the way up the stalk. Now you want to keep as much of that foliage on the plant during the bloom season. So, when you deadhead, you're going to deadhead right toward the top. Just take off that spent bloom. Now roses are a different story altogether. Now, I love my lavender latex and cloth gloves, but these are not the gloves for pruning roses. You need to protect your hands from the thorns, so use some heavy-duty leather gloves. They protect not only your hand but also part of your arm. Now here, you'll see, we have a clustering rose. Now, on a floribunda or a climber, when you have these clusters, it's always the center bloom that blooms first. So, you want to take that center bloom when it's finished and just snip that right out. Now what that's going to do, is encourage the rest of the cluster to continue blooming. Now the rule of thumb when deadheading roses is you want to deadhead down to the first five leaflet leaves, so you have one, two, three, four, five - so you want to prune right above that. And you see, we already have the new shoot coming up, so we're all ready for our next flush of blooms. Now, you can also keep your containers looking nice all throughout the season by deadheading off all the old blooms. You notice here I have some zinnias that have bloomed out, so what we'll do is we'll take it just down here to the end of the stalk, take that bloom right out. So, you can see, by deadheading all the flowers in your garden, you can keep your garden looking beautiful and colorful all season long."