Green Thumb Tip - Deadheading flowers

You always hear gardeners talking about deadheading their flowers and how important it is if you want your plants to keep on producing more flowers. I love being out in the garden and over the years have deadheaded a lot of flowers, but didn't realize why I was doing it or if I was ever doing it right. Turns out that I was doing some right, but not all of them so I have decided to share my new found knowledge of proper deadheading (that I learned from my mother while visiting her in June) with any readers out there! Maybe you can learn something new and helpful too.

Bump was so sweet and surprised me with hanging baskets for our front porch, in red like I wanted but getting them later in the season they looked a bit spindly with lots of dead flowers on them. Don't get me wrong - I absolutely loved them and they were full and beautiful, but just needed a bit of work. This is the before picture from the fullest basket.

This is a close up from one of the spindly branches - notice all of the green "flowers" or flower stems without the red blossom part? More on that to follow.

Most people when they go to deadhead a flower just pull of the dead or wilted part of the flower off and leave the green base of the flower. This is the big mistake. The actual flower on this petunia is the green part below the red part of the flower. The whole reason that a plant produces a flower is to produce seeds. When you just take off the dead part of the flower you aren't actually removing the "seed" part and so the plant thinks it has produced enough seeds and will eventually stop producing flowers.

The best way to have a plant keep producing beautiful flowers is to completely remove the flower, seeds and all. This way the plant thinks, "Uh-oh, I haven't reproduced and need to work harder to make that happen." And you end up benefiting from more flowers.
Because my plants had not been properly deadheaded I had to go back and remove all the green flowers that had been left when the red, wilted parts had been removed. It was a bigger job than I thought it would be and ended up taking me about an hour per plant to do initially, but it was worth it in the end. Once I did the initial deadheading now maintaining is pretty easy.

This is the same spindly branch with all the green flowers, that had already bloomed, taken off. Now all the cute little buds that were hidden behind those can have a chance to bloom and fill out these branches again. It will make for a much fuller plant all around.
And this is the same basket after deadheading. Is it perfect?? No. Did I get every single blossim? I am sure I didn't, but it looks cleaner and nicer and will fill out better over the next weeks and months. I now go out every day or every other day and just deadhead those that have faded. It takes a few minutes per plant and keeps them looking really great.
Happy Gardening!! Hope this helps!