Gardening
Increase Flowers with a Bit of Deadheading
Removing the individual blooms of balloon flower as they fade will keep this plant looking its best.
Photo courtesy of MelindaMyers.com
Keep your garden looking its best with a bit of deadheading. Removing faded flowers can promote repeat bloom on some plants, encourage fuller, more compact growth, and tidy up the garden.
Use a bypass pruner or deadheading snips to remove faded flowers. These tools have two sharp blades like scissors. This results in a clean cut that closes quickly, leaving your plant looking its best.
The type of flower will influence how and where to make the cut. In general, remove the stem of faded blooms back to the first set of healthy leaves or nearby flower buds.
Deadhead flowers like salvia, veronica, and snapdragons by removing faded flowers to encourage more blooms. Make cuts below the faded flower and above a set of healthy leaves or new flower stems.
Encourage additional blossoms and improve Shasta daisy's appearance by removing faded flowers. Prune back just above a set of healthy leaves.
Cut the flowers of Armeria, coral bells and other flowers back to the base of the flower stems that arise from the foliage. This improves the appearance and encourages more blooms on some of this type of flowering perennial.
Plants like daylilies and balloon flowers require a bit different care for a tidier look. Remove the individual blooms as they fade. Once bloomed out, you can cut the flower stem back at the base. Allowing the faded flowers to hang on the stem until it is all bloomed out won't hurt the plant, it just detracts from the plant's overall beauty.
Removing fading flowers of fuchsia and lantana will prevent the plants from going to seed and encourage more blooms. Remove any berries that do form to keep these plants flowering.
Some plants like impatiens, cuphea and calibrachoas are self-cleaning. Old blossoms fall off the plants as new flowers form, eliminating the need for deadheading.
Deadhead heavy seeders like columbine to reduce the number of seedlings and contain the spread. Or allow some seeds to develop if you have space to fill or want lots of seedlings to transplant to new garden beds.
Allow seedheads to develop on coneflowers, rudbeckias, and other plants that provide winter interest and food for the birds.
Remove flowers as they appear on coleus to promote more compact growth. Late blooming, flowerless varieties and self-branching coleus hybrids reduce or eliminate time spent on this task.
Consider skipping the deadheading of late blooming perennials. This allows them to prepare for winter and form seedpods for a bit of winter interest.
Improve the appearance of leggy plants with long stems and few leaves with a bit of pruning. Cut back further into the leafy stem when deadheading to encourage fuller growth as well as more flowers.
Make deadheading part of your regular garden maintenance. Investing time throughout the season will help keep your garden looking its best.
Melinda Myers has written more than 20 gardening books, including The Midwest Gardener's Handbook, 2nd Edition and Small Space Gardening. She hosts The Great Courses "How to Grow Anything" DVD series and the nationally-syndicated Melinda's Garden Moment TV & radio program. Myers is a columnist and contributing editor for Birds & Blooms magazine. Her web site is www.MelindaMyers.com.
Antiques
Latest Antiques and Collectibles News
I hope readers who attended Brimfield did well selling and/or buying this week. If you missed this latest show, you'll have another opportunity September 6th through the 11th.
There's been plenty of antique, collectibles and auction news since my last update. Let's start in Massachusetts where a rare 1652 Dutch Master drawing of naval officer Admiral Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp fetched a huge price at auction recently. The New York Times reported last month that the drawing was offered as "an unidentified gentleman, initialed I.L., and dated 1652." You may remember from my recent column about old samplers that the letter "I" was used in place of "J" because "J" was not part of the Latin alphabet. This was also true of Dutch Master drawings.
The "I.L." was actually the JL signature of artist Jan Lievens, who had produced engravings and created paintings based on this sketch. The original drawing was sold at auction in Frankfurt in 1888. Its location was unknown until it recently went to auction. A Dutch art dealer found the drawing while looking through online auction catalogs and arranged to view it prior to the auction. The auction hall only had around half a dozen bidders in-house due to COVID-19. There were also five phone bidders competing for the drawing. It sold for $514,800, far exceeding the $200 to $300 estimate.
Across the pond, a rare copy of Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" also topped auction estimates when it sold in England earlier this month. T Bone Burnett recorded the song when it was performed by Dylan and a group of other musicians in Los Angeles in 1962. It was recorded on a new type of acetate that Burnett had developed called an "Ionic Original." It was created to offer higher fidelity and was almost impervious to normal wear. The recording sold for $1,769,508 USD, beating out the $716,000-$1,194,000 estimate.
It may be too early for Halloween, but an antique vampire slaying kit recently sold for over six times the estimate. CNN reported that "the 19th century box has everything you would need to ward off vampires including crucifixes, holy water, a wooden stake and more." The kit belonged to Lord William Hailey who was a member of England's House of Lords. The kit sold at a UK auction for close to $16,000 USD. There was no word on whether Lord Hailey ever wielded the vampire kit.
We are still accepting consignments for our fall multi-estate online auction. Some of the offerings include gold jewelry, baseball cards from the 19th century to the 1960s, coins, Civil War memorabilia, pocket watches, paintings and a wide variety of other items. We will also be running an estate sale in Walpole, MA on July 23rd. I'll be teaching my "Evaluating your Antiques" course at the Bay Path Evening School in Charlton, MA on September 13th. I'll also be appraising items for the Townsend Historical Society on October 15th and for the Leicester Historical Society at the Leicester Senior Center on November 5th. We are planning other events for the fall. Please visit our website www.centralmassauctions.com for links to upcoming events
Contact us at: Wayne Tuiskula Auctioneer/Appraiser Central Mass Auctions for Antique Auctions, Estate Sales and Appraisal Services www.centralmassauctions.com (508-612- 6111) info@centralmassauctions.com