Top tip for dead-heading and pruning
Encourage new growth by removing spent blooms.
After the beautiful first summer blooms, many flowering perennials are now covered with spent flowers, busy producing seeds inside.
Some plants have a big flush of flowers whilst other’s flowers consistently over their flowering period.
The longer you leave spent blooms on the plant, the more resources, or nutrients they utilize to produce seeds, and the plant will feel that it has completed its lifecycle.
If you remove spent blooms once the flower petals shrivel up, it will encourage more flowers to pop!
You can give those plants a beautiful second late summer-autumn flush of flowers by doing some light pruning and removing all flowers, followed by an application of liquid fertilizer, such as Ocean Brew.
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