Hello, my name is Thomas Lowe and I'm a landscape designer in Atlanta, Georgia. Today, I'll be giving you tips on deadheading shrubs and perennials. This is an iris perennial and iris perennials need deadheading early in the summer. Now the reason why people deadhead and what deadheading is, is when you're cutting off the spent flowers. What the perennial or shrub is trying to do is, is after it flowers it's trying to develop a seed. And if you cut these seeds off what it tells the flower is, is to make more flowers so that you have a lot of flowers throughout the rest of the growing season. Now I have a lot of people ask "well do I cut the spent flower right here at the base of the spent flower or in this case where the seed's trying to develop?" Actually you really go all the way to where the stem joins another stem that has a flower or a bud. I highly recommend to use these hand pruners. You can get these in any garden center, most retail shops carry these. Very handy in the garden for many different uses. So anyway, this is the spent flower and it will develop into a seed. If you don't deadhead the flowers and shrubs will not produce flowers as much throughout the growing season. So you would find a spent flower or developing seed, follow it all the way to where it goes into another step and then you prune on an angle as close as you can. Then you can take what's left over, the stem and the seed, and just compost this. Now some people say "Well what's the difference between a bud, so I don't cut my buds off, or the spent flower?" This is a great example here. The spent flowers or developing seeds, you'll see a lot of times will be very brown and worn, as shown here. A bud tends to be much more compact and also you can see some of the smaller flowers a lot of color, you know if it's a pink flower, it'd be a pink, if it's purple then it'd be more purples. So this is a very good example of this iris that is showing us here between a developing seed or spent flower and a bud. So you never want to cut these buds off. Always the spent flower. in this case you'd trim right into here. In this case you would trim all the way to the junction of where the stem goes to the other stem. This will send more energy and will also send more nutrients all the way up and will help to develop a much healthier flower for your shrubs or your perennials. Now lets get to pruning those shrubs. This is a knockout rose shrub and these flower profusely all throughout the summer in most of the United States. And right now you're not going to have to do a tremendous amount of deadheading on this two year old shrub. But it will grow very quickly and the bigger it gets the more you're going to have to deadhead. So when you go to deadhead this rose bush shrub what you need to look for are spent flowers or seed pods developing. This is a seed pod or a spent flower that is starting to develop here. And I tell a lot of my clients that it looks like a star shape, it almost looks like a star on this particular rose bush. So you don't get confused about what to deadhead, I always say the teardrop shapes, which is right here, the teardrop shapes, those are buds, the star shapes, that's the seed head developing and if you don't deadhead these, you wait a week, a couple months, the seed head gets larger. It can get all the way up to a little bit bigger than a golf ball and it soaks up a lot of nutrients and it wont flower as much unless you deadhead the seed head here. So what I'm going to do is, as we spoke of earlier with the iris perennial, you need to take the stem and prune it all the way back to the junction like this and then here's another one here I pruned a little earlier and that's what it looks like as well, it looks like a star shape. You can use scissor pruners. Also you can use, as it gets a little bit more mature the plant, you can use these hand pruners, scissor pruners for more smaller type of perennials and shrubs. Now in another year, a couple years, if you have a massive hedge of knockout roses or heavy flowering shrubs that need to be deadheaded quite a bit I recommend going in and using these shears. It's a lot more efficient, a lot quicker. Occasionally you'll snag one of these buds but it makes the job a lot more efficient, and you just sort of take these and you know, you can angle them as you start to see a lot of your spent flowers. My name is Thomas Lowe and I'm a landscape designer in Atlanta Georgia. You can see more of my videos and designs at eHow.com/thomaslowe or on Facebook at Thomas Lowe Landscape Designs. Thank you.
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