Promote Growth by Cutting Fresh Flowers

Summer is the best time to sit back and relax outdoors, but it’s the worst time to neglect your yard and garden. Here’s how to keep your annuals blooming.

Deadheading: To ensure color until frost, remove blooms from your annuals as soon as they fade. This simple procedure, called deadheading, ensures maximum and continuous blooming all summer. You can also promote growth by regularly cutting fresh flowers for indoor bouquets.

Shearing back: Many annuals need rejuvenating in midsummer. To encourage fresh growth and more flowers, cut the stems back by one-third with pruning shears.

Pinching back. Tall, leggy stems are a common malady of such annuals as petunia, geranium, browallia, begonia and impatiens.

Keep them bushy and blooming by pinching back stems just above a set of leaves. This will stimulate new side branching and flower formation within a couple of weeks.