Bring out the Shears for better blooms

- Flowers in your backyard garden are ephemeral - They vanish without a trace at the end of each season - Doesn't mean you shouldn't prune

Pruning can help make more flowers, make the plants bushier or increase the size of individual flow ers.
So grab your hand shears and sharpen your thumb nail for a stroll among the flowers.
Start with a pinch, for bushiness
Pinching out the tips of growing stems stops, at least temporarily, their growth, in so doing coaxing growth of side shoots. The result Bushier plants. Even though plants such as lavat-era, marigold and zinnia are naturally bushy, pinch ing out the tips of their stems makes them more so. Don't carry pinching to excess, though, because it does delay flowering; pinching is something you want to do mostly at the be ginning of the growing sea son. And plants with more side shoots will have more-— but smaller — flowers.

A pinch might make bigger Flowers
Just as pinching the tips of stems makes bushier plants with more but small er flowers, limiting the number of stems or flowers has the opposite effect. This is how you grow "football" mums and "dinnerplate" dahlias. Create a plant with fewer but larger flowers by pinching off side shoots, pinching off flower buds forming along a stem, or re ducing the number of stems sprouting from ground level


Deadhead for more flowers
— called deadheading — is yet another way pruning gets the best out of your flower plants. Deadheading does double duty, keeping plants tidy and preventing seed formation. Seed for mation can drain enough energy from a plant to slow or stop flowering.
Deadheading is especial ly effective at keeping an nuals energetic because all they live for is to flower enough to set some seeds. Then these plants slow down or die, all in one season.
Pruning flowers at the right time and in the right circumstances can mean either bigger blooms for bushier plants.



Cut the spent flowers
Cutting individual, spent flowers from mounded plants bear ing small flowers would be much too tedious. Deadhead alyssum, nasturtium, petunias and other such plants by shear ing the whole plant back with either grass or hedge shears after a flush of bloom. Give mound ed perennials like basket-of-gold, cottage pink, edging candytuft and spike speedwell similar treatment. All these plants will look ragged for a while, but soon cover shorn stems and leaves with new growth and flow ers.

Deadheading also keeps plants tidy by preventing unwanted self-seeding.