How to Deadhead Geraniums to Keep the Flowers Coming All Summer

Learning how to deadhead geraniums is a snap. Deadheading is simply removing the old, fading flowers from a plant. While it's not absolutely necessary to do, this technique has two main benefits. Deadheading all types of geraniums helps maintain their appearance and encourages more blooms in your garden pots and planters. Here's what you need to know about why, when, and how to deadhead geraniums.

Why to Deadhead Geraniums

Despite our preferences, plants don’t make flowers to please us–it’s part of their lifecycle. A plant flowers to reproduce itself. Flowers contain the reproductive parts and pieces (stamen, pistil, ovule, pollen, etc.) necessary for pollination and subsequent formation of seeds. For many plants, once they’ve successfully created seeds for the next generation of their species, they stop flowering, and put their energy into forming those seeds.

Seeds are little packages containing embryos for the next generation. A lot of resources are used to make those seeds, and it takes away from energy used for growing or further flowering. Some plants may even die completely after forming seeds. We don’t want that–we want more flowers!

Deadheading is an effective technique because it frustrates the plant's seed-making mission by removing flowers that are no longer pretty before the plant can create the seeds. Because the plant was thwarted at making seeds, it tries again with another flower. Eventually, at the end of the season, we can let it go to seed or not, depending on our goals. Removing the spent flowers from your geraniums encourages them to continue flowering and keeps their appearance tidy.