this video is going to cover how to deadhead and maintain euphorbia our tinny eye Blackbird and Ascot rainbow and a lot of other varieties that are similar in their form and so first thing to know is that the sap of this plant is poisonous and an irritant and so I got some of the one you see on the bottom left here that's euphorbia rujuta when I cleaned it up I got a reaction much like poison oak so be very careful with the sap of this plant here you're seeing the thicker stem of the older flower and then the green leaves that are starting to come out already on this plant you're going to find in these three different varieties that they behave a little differently martini eye which is this one is nice because even while it's blooming and finishing its bloom it starts pushing new growth near the base of the plant and so what you see here is all this nice new growth as the flowers are finishing up they don't all behave that way Escott rainbow and blackbird both put all their energy into blooming and have very few new leaves pushing and why that's relevant is that you really want to remove the old stems that have the blooms on them as far down as you can because unlike most plants there's the SAP by the way very white and milky um unlike most plants when you prune usually right below the pruning or the cut you get three or four bud nodes that will spread and and come back up for you and fill the plant out these really don't behave that way those stems that when you cut them don't sprout that the plant pushes from the very base of the plant so in this case what I'm doing is I'm treating it more like I would a normal shrub which is I'm pruning right below the foliage level and then and then I've already got the green fill the way I want it to look when I do the other varieties I'm taking it much lower so that it I don't end up with stems that just end up dying anyway and don't have any use in this case you're not going to see those so and honestly when I was doing this one I hadn't learned what I'm telling you yet but when I started looking at the different plants and I did some research I saw that that was the case so in this case I'm pruning it more for aesthetics and I'm not trying to remove the old stem all the way down to the base I'm doing it below the foliage level to hide it but if you really there's no reason to leave those stems at all and you can take them as low as possible which you'll see in a moment with Blackbird and Ascot rainbow so here I am pruning ascott rainbow and I'm leaving some of the foliage on there but they're still only about 9 to 10 inches long until the new growth comes up and fills and covers over those so that was just an aesthetic decision I was making there here's Blackbird those stems have no leaves on them so this plant you're going to see in a second here I take it all the way down to 2 or 3 inches and that's that pending on the type you have and how they behave at the end of their bloom it's really going to drive how you prune these but generally the older stems should go down as low as possible and this will fill back out the other thing about this family in general and why I think deadheading them is important to understand is because some of these are blatant pests they go to seed and really start to sprout all over the place so depending on what variety you're dealing with you may want to be deadheading the sooner than later so that the seeds aren't spreading everywhere these varieties I've shown you I haven't had a problem with that yet but I do know that some of the other varieties of euphorbia can be very hard to manage let's just say and a lot of people won't use them because of that so those you're going to want to deadhead as soon as they start to become seeds and and the color of the main bloom is finished and that's how you deadhead and maintain euphorbia Martini i Blackbird and Ascot rainbow enjoy