Learning how to deadhead geraniums will help your plants look their best all season long.
While it’s not absolutely necessary to do, this technique has two main benefits.
Deadheading all types ofgeraniumshelps maintain their appearance and encourages more blooms in your garden pots and planters.
Credit:Peter Krumhardt
A plant flowers to reproduce itself.
Flowers contain the reproductive parts and pieces (stamen, pistil, ovule, pollen, etc.)
necessary for pollination and subsequent formation of seeds.
Seeds are little packages containing embryos for the next generation.
Some plants may even die completely after forming seeds.
We dont want thatwe want more flowers!
Because the plant was thwarted at making seeds, it tries again with another flower.
Removing the spent flowers from your geraniums encourages them to continue flowering and keeps their appearance tidy.
A geranium flower head is ready to be deadheaded when it starts to fade and drop petals.
How often to deadhead your geraniums varies with the weather.
Hot and dry conditions or storms can cause blooms to look faded and tattered faster.
Barring extreme conditions, checking once or twice a week for flowers to deadhead will suffice.
If you use a tool, dont snip off the flower heads right below the petals.
Youll end up with funky-looking flowerless stalks sticking out of the plant.
Always cut them off where the flower stalk attaches to a stem.
The three keys to this outcome are providing the right amounts of water, light, and fertilizer.
Water
Geraniums are drought tolerant, one of the reasons they aregreat for containers and hanging baskets.
They dont want to be watered quite as much as many other plants.
Let their soil slightly dry out between waterings.
If in doubt, use your finger to test the soil.
Light
Geraniums are heat-loving plants that enjoy sunshine.
Most varieties will flower best in a location with at leastsix hours of sunlight daily.
While they will tolerate some shade, they will grow slower and flower less.
Choose aslow-release fertilizerfor in-ground geraniums, applying once in early summer and again later in the blooming season.
