How to Rid a Garden of Old Flowers

On behalf of Expert Village, my name is Craig Morell. I'm with Landscape Restorations in Miami, Florida. We're here at Palm Hammock Orchid Estate in Miami, Florida talking about basic gardening. The title of this clip essentially, is that old flowers are useless, so cut them off. Here's a good example. This is an old garden rose called Mrs. Dudley Cross. These flower buds have pretty much done their job. So once the flower buds are old, and whether it's on a rose, or on a marigold or a coleus or a celosia, or just about any plant that you can get to; cut the flower buds off. Because what happens so frequently, is that they'll turn into seed heads. Here's a very good example: as a rose does this sort of a thing, it will stop it from flowering. So we're simply going to cut off the old flower heads, like that. We are not going to prune the plant, we are just going to get rid of the old seed pods and the old flowers. In that fashion it now tells the plant, it can go ahead and flower again. It not only does that, but it also makes space and sunlight for this shoot of the plant to send up more flowers. That's the idea unless you happen to be in the propagation business.