How to Deadhead Geraniums (The Right Way for More Blooms)

Walk around the plant and look for clusters where the petals are wilted, browning at the edges, or starting to fall off. Those tired blooms are the ones to remove. Healthy flowers stay - cutting off blooms that still have life in them just deletes color you would have enjoyed.

The other thing to watch for is petal drop. As a bloom dies, individual petals fall off and land on the leaves below. Those petals are the start of the rot problem - they sit in the dense geranium foliage, hold moisture, and infect the leaf they are sitting on.

This is the cut almost every new gardener makes and the reason geraniums get such a bad reputation for disease. You see the dead bloom on top of a stalk and you snip the stalk right behind the flower. Looks tidy. Plant disagrees.

What you have left is a bare stem sticking straight up. Over the next few days it browns, softens, and rots downward into the leaves below. That rotting tissue is wet, sheltered, and full of plant sugar. It is exactly what botrytis and stem rot need to get going. One bad cut can take down a whole basket.

This is the move. Trace the bloom's stem down through the foliage to where it meets the main body of the plant. You will feel a slight bulge - the knuckle - where the stalk attaches. Pinch the stem just above that joint between your thumb and forefinger.

Push sideways with your thumb in one quick motion. The stem pops off cleanly. There is a tiny audible snap - Scott calls it satisfying and he is right. No scissors, no shears, no ragged cut. The plant seals over the break in a day or two and disease has nothing to grab onto.

While you are in there, pick out everything that should not be on the plant. Loose petals sitting on the leaves. Brown or yellow leaves still attached. Anything spotted, soft, or chewed. Geraniums grow such dense foliage that this debris collects in the middle of the canopy and at the soil line where you cannot see it from above.

Drop all of it in a trash bag. Do not compost geranium leaves that show signs of disease - the spores survive most home compost piles and you will reinfect the plant next year when you spread the finished compost.

The temptation is to deadhead everything in one afternoon. Do not. If you take every spent bloom at once, the plant runs out of flowers, redirects all its energy into making new buds, then those open all at the same time, finish at the same time, and you are back to a bare plant.

Instead, pick off the three or four worst offenders today. Come back in three or four days for the next batch. That rolling cadence keeps the plant in constant bloom rather than the boom-bust cycle most gardeners end up with.

Snapping off blooms and leaves takes plant tissue away. The plant needs nutrients to rebuild. This is the perfect moment to fertilize - the timing tells the plant that you want growth, and the soluble nutrients are right there when the new buds start forming.

A water-soluble flower fertilizer mixed at the rate on the label is the easiest option. Sharkey's recommends Beat Your Neighbor All-Purpose, which is the white container Scott is holding in the video. Anything similar with balanced N-P-K works. Apply to soil that is already damp, not bone dry, so the salts do not burn the roots.

Work your way around the plant in a single slow pass. Each time you find a spent bloom, trace the stem down to the knuckle and snap. Each time you find a brown leaf, pinch it off at the base. The whole plant gets done in a few minutes once the rhythm is going.

Within a couple of days the new buds that were already forming underneath the canopy will pop into bloom. The plant fills back in, looks fresh, and stays in the bloom-and-feed cycle for the rest of the summer instead of crashing in midseason.