You take a look at the garden and wonder, “Where have all my pretty flowers gone?”  Take heart.  If you’ve got perennials, the answer is fairly easy.  They are waiting to be dead-headed.

Dead-heading is simply removing the spent flowers and giving them the chance to delight you again.  Dead-heading serves many purposes.  First of all, it will make your garden look fresher and cleaner if you get in there and pinch, snip or chop off the spent blooms and tired foliage.   It also helps to promote the healthy new growth of the plant.

Flowering is the reproductive mechanism of your blooming plants.  The flowers are its way of trying to perpetuate itself through reproduction.  If you remove the tired blooms before they go to seed, the healthy plant will respond by producing more flowers.  Flowering is its natural response to the need to reproduce.  Ah ha!

There are several ways to dead head.  You can simply pinch off the old blooms between your finger and thumb.  On flowers that are produced on long stems, you would remove the entire flower and stem from the base of the stem.  You can use small pruners or if it’s a big job; get out the pruning shears and chop off the spent flowers in one fell swoop.  Be sure to cut down to the base of the stems on those flowers that produce on long stems.

Generally, most of your perennials will respond quite well to dead heading.  After you clean up your mess, and you must clean up your mess, things should look much cleaner.  If things look a little more chopped than you had planned, don’t worry.  The difference between a good haircut and a bad haircut is usually just a few weeks.

Note:  If you fertilize your flowers, steer clear of high nitrogen fertilizers.  Nitrogen will enhance growth and greening but can inhibit flowering.  Choose a “blooming” fertilizer and test the claims on the label by making sure the second number in the three numbers listed on the label is higher in proportion to the other two numbers.   Ex: 5-7-2.