What NOT to do with Petunias!!!!!

This is a photograph of a hanging basket of petunias—there are LOTS of these pitiful looking

Call the Petunia Police!

 petunias hanging around in town this year—and I consider this evidence of a crime against petunias. WHERE are the Petunia Police?

I actually offered to cut these blooms back for the owner, so that the plant could regenerate and renew itself, but I was turned down—really! Yes, that was indignation you heard in my tone.

The reason? “There’s still some color on it!” Uh huh. Please—those few remaining blooms are the last gasp of a nearly exhausted annual, and you’re prolonging the agony. And, you’re wasting your plant dollars, because you’re getting the least from the petunias, instead of the most.

The most annoying thing about this is that later, this same person is going to complain that she just can’t seem to keep petunias pretty—that they always disappoint her. Well, she’s disappointing the petunia.

Generalization: Once an annual has bloomed, if it isn’t pinched or cut back, it will think that its job is over and it will begin to send energy to the seeds instead of to the blooms. They can’t help it—that’s what they do. So you, the gardener, can either accept that, and get one burst of bloom from your annuals, OR, you can trick the annual into thinking it’s still time to bloom, so that it will keep blooming. The “trick” is removing the blooms, AND THE SEEDS, after the first bloom begins to fade.

This is not absolutely true about all annuals, but it is very much true of petunias. If you don’t pinch off both the bloom and the little green cap at the base of the bloom, you get scraggly looking plants like the petunia in the basket.

In this photo you can see a few last-minute, top-of-the-stem blooms—further down the stems, you can see dried blooms that are still hanging on, and you can see all the empty seed caps that remain after the blooms fall off. Every one of those faded bloom locations has now received the message that bloom-time is over, so they’re busy setting seed and getting ready to die. This ia a real waste of petunia-power.

If, as the plant bloomed, the fading blooms had been removed as they faded (it only takes a couple of minutes a day, and it can be very Zen!), this plant would look full, healthy, and the blooms would occur all over the plant, instead of at the ends of used up stems. This plant is just sad.

If the plant were cut back hard at this point, it might be able to perform at least one more bloom, but it will take longer than the owner will want to wait, so it probably won’t get done. Instead, it will hang there until it produces its very last, pitiful bloom, and then it will look awful until it’s discarded. It will be discarded, with disgust, because it just didn’t do what the owner wanted—it didn’t bloom over and over again.

Well-groomed petunias will bloom pretty steadily from spring through to frost. That’s true of nearly all well-groomed annuals. If you don’t want to do the grooming, then you’re simply making the term “annual” more literal than is necessary.

Poorly groomed petunias are ugly—they don’t die pretty. They don’t just shrivel up and disappear politely—they look post-nuclear when they languish.

If any of your petunias look like this right now, it’s time for emergency intervention. Cut them all the way back to the green leaves at the base. Water them, and keep them moist, but not wet. Don’t feed them with anything stronger than root stimulator—a week later you can begin feeding them weekly with a water-soluble plant food. Keep them watered, and fed, and pray to the Petunia Gods to forgive you for your sins. Promise to do better, keep the promise, and the petunias will reward you with season-long beauty.