hi I'm Debbie with Spring Hill and today we're going to take the mystery out of deadheading now deadheading is exactly how it sounds it's just taking off old blooms in the middle of your blooming season to encourage new blooms now that's different from pruning which we'll cover in a separate video now there are a few different ways to deadhead as you see next to me this hosta has one chute of blooms coming up and as you can see it's all bloomed out so what you would do is take this entire stalk off you see I'm not removing much in the way of foliage just taking off the bloom what that's going to do is give you a nice healthy-looking plant and get it ready for its next flush of blooms now day lilies are just the same as hostas all you want to do is take out that main chute but what day lilies you don't even need your pruners so here hang on to these for a second would you Thanks all you're going to do is take these old Brown stalks and just yank them right up and by the way while you're deadhead in your day lilies it's also a good time to take out some of this dead foliage underneath the plant that'll keep it looking really nice now easy attic lilies are going to be different from day lilies now you notice on the blooming stuff that there's foliage all the way up the stuff now you want to keep as much of that foliage on the plant during the bloom season so when you deadhead you're going to deadhead right toward the top just take off that spent bloom now roses are a different story altogether now I love my lavender latex and cloth gloves but these are not the gloves for pruning roses you need to protect your hands from the thorns so use some heavy-duty leather gloves that protect not only your hand but also part of your arm now here you'll see we have a clustering rose now on a floribunda or a climber when you have these clusters it's always the center bloom that blooms first so you want to take that center bloom when it's finished and just snip that right out and what's that that's going to do is encourage the rest of the cluster to continue blooming now the rule of thumb when deadheading roses is you want to dead head down to the first five leaflet leaf so you here you have one two three four five so you want to prune right above that and you see we already have the new shook coming up so we're all ready for our next flush of blooms now you can also keep your containers looking nice all throughout the season by deadheading off all the old blooms you notice here I have some zinnias that are bloomed out so what we'll do is we'll take it just down here to the end of the stock take that bloom right out so you can see by deadheading all the flowers in your garden you can keep your garden looking beautiful and colorful all season long