On Todays 5minute Friday, we are going to show you how to dead head your Rudbeckia.
This is a follow up video, we showed you how to plant up a Rudbeckias into a container, as you can see, they have grown so well, just fresh compost and regular water in a sunny spot and these are how these Rudbeckia can do.
As you can see, there is lots of buds coming through and lots of flowers, so we want to encourage more growth, we need to deadhead these Rudbeckia. I had imagined this pot against a wall, so we have the taller plants at the back, stepping down to the front, with 3 different varieties.
To deadhead, we want to find flowers that have just gone over, they may not have spent entirely, but we are looking for the new buds, in order for them to have energy to grow. Where we still have the nearly spent flowers, the plant is using its energy on them, instead of putting it into the new bud. If you dead head on a regular basis, you will tend to get more buds and flowers.
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- Find the spent flowers, and with a sharp pair of secateurs, as Rudbeckias have quite sturdy stems, they are difficult to pinch with your fingers.
- Cut down to where the next leaf is and just snip the stem off.
- Work your way around the container, even if not all the flowers aren’t spent, I tend to dead head anyway, for all the reasons I have mentioned.
