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Petunias may be one of the most popular annual flowers to add to your garden, as they’re easy to care for and deliver gorgeous blooms that brighten up your containers, hanging baskets, and garden beds all through the summer until the first frost. But there’s one task you’ll need to take on to keep your petunias looking gorgeous all season long—deadheading your petunias.
Fortunately, it’s super easy to deadhead petunias (no tools required!)—and you’ll get a more prolific and beautiful plant with very little work if you take a few minutes to deadhead spent petunia blooms every few days.
Learn everything you need to know about how to deadhead petunias so that your plants thrive well into fall.
Why You Need to Deadhead Petunias
Deadheading spent flowers helps enhance your petunia plant’s health and beauty. It removes wilted or dried flowers and seed pods to focus your petunia’s energy toward producing new blooms. (Otherwise, your plant will be putting all of its energy into growing seed pods in conjunction with those wilted flowers.)
Aesthetically, having all fresh blooms on your plants will make your garden look even more beautiful. Plus, deadheading petunias results in even more blooms to enjoy.
Some varieties of petunias—including wave or “supertunia” petunias—self-clean spent blooms, which means that they drop the flower and the seed pods by themselves. You can still deadhead any blooms you see that look faded, but your plant will take care of most of the deadheading on its own.
Also, petunias that aren’t deadheaded can become “leggy,” which means that they develop longer, straggly-looking stems with fewer blooms on them. By keeping your petunia plant properly shaped, it will have a denser and more compact growing pattern.
How to Deadhead Petunias Properly
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Deadheading petunias is a pretty easy task—no gloves, pruning shears, or extra equipment required. Just use your thumb and forefinger to pinch off spent blooms. You want to make sure you get the full bloom (not just the petals), so pinch it off at the base where the flower’s stem meets the main stem of the plant.
If your plants start to get that leggy look, you should do a deeper pruning (which you should do with a pair of shears). Cut longer, straggly looking petunia stems back to a main stem or a set of leaves, so your plant is shaped properly. You don’t want to get too drastic with this pruning, though—cut back no more than a third of the overall petunia’s size. Generally, you may want to do this deeper pruning a few times over the growing season—about once every four to six weeks is perfect for keeping your petunia plants in shape.
If you’ve given your petunia plant a heavier pruning, follow it up with a dose of fertilizer to help it quickly recover and get back to blooming.
How Often to Deadhead Petunias
Deadheading petunias isn’t really a time-consuming gardening task (unless you have huge beds dedicated to the flowers!)—so you may want to take a few minutes every time you pass your plants to deadhead spent blooms.
Otherwise, most gardening experts recommend that you deadhead your petunias a few times a week (or at least weekly) to help prevent your plant from becoming too leggy and ensure that your petunia plant puts all of its energy toward producing even more flowers for you.
