One of the brightest stars of the summer garden, zinnia flowers offer show-stopping beauty in a rainbow of vibrant colors. While zinnias are low-maintenance annuals that take care of themselves for the most part, deadheading is essential to keep this plant prolific. Deadheading the spent blooms will keep the zinnias producing a steady succession of flowers all season long. Ahead, flower farmers explain how and when to deadhead zinnias for a flush of colorful blooms from summer to the first frost.

When to Deadhead Zinnias

When it comes to zinnias, deadheading isn’t just a one-and-done task. “Deadhead zinnias throughout the season by regularly removing individual spent flowers,” says Julia Keel of Full Keel Farm. Continually inspect your zinnias throughout the growing season and deadhead when you see brown or faded flowers. 

That said, you can also cut zinnias before the blooms have faded. “On our farm, since we grow for cut flowers, we go through all zinnia beds and cut all mature blooms every three days,” says Jennifer Joray of Eastern River Farm. “This means that all the blooms on the plants are fresh and never need deadheading.” She notes that waiting longer is fine, but the more frequently you cut mature blooms, the faster fresh new blooms will appear.

Benefits of Deadheading Zinnias

Deadheading zinnias helps you enjoy the blooms for longer. “The primary reason to deadhead zinnias is to prevent them from going to seed so that they continue to produce flowers for as long as possible,” says Brenna Estrada of Three Brothers Blooms. The life cycle of an annual flower includes flowering, getting pollinated, setting seed, and dying.

Joray says that the plant will continue to produce blooms throughout the season in hopes of pollination, and deadheading tells the zinnia plant to produce another flower to complete its life cycle. “We benefit from more color and fresh blooms all season long,” she says. “Cut more, get more.”

How to Deadhead Zinnias

Follow these steps to ensure successful deadheading of your zinnia blossoms.

1. Identify a Spent Bloom

When the color intensity of a particular bloom is waning or turning brown around the edges, it’s time to deadhead. “Look for flowers that have faded in color, have shriveled or browned petals, or have a central cone that has started to discolor,” says Keel. “Beyond improving the overall appearance of the planting, deadheading zinnias will help maintain a longer season of continuous blooms by encouraging the plant to put energy into flower production rather than seed production.”

2. Locate Where to Cut

Choose where you cut your flowers carefully. “When deadheading zinnias, rather than just removing the spent flower, cut the stem farther down on the plant above a set of leaf nodes,” says Joray. “This will promote more growth from the base of the plant and produce more long-stemmed blooms.” Zinnias typically branch from where the stem is cut, allowing the plant to produce even more flowers, Estrada adds.

3. Snip or Pull the Bloom Off

Cut zinnias with clean, sanitized garden scissors or pruners to prevent the spread of disease between plants. Joray also suggests an alternative method: “One tip for success in deadheading zinnias is to use gloved fingers and gently ‘peel’ off the flower from its base.” She recommends gloves. “You can use bare hands, but your fingers will turn green, and it is difficult to get the plant sap off with soap.”

If you love to plant summer planters, you’re in the right place today! I got mine planted about a month ago and they are growing well, so I’ll share the plants I got as well as how they are looking after a month. I have always loved planting summer annuals, but not particularly in the ground. I love those too, but they are a lot more work to keep going and having planters around our pool really adds to the summer ambience in our backyard.

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I forgot to take pics before I got everything planted, but here’s what I bought this year. I love shades of pink, so that’s what I usually do in my backyard planters. Pink just works together and combined with green shades, it’s a winner! I bought pink vinca, pink and green caladiums, pink and green coleus (the shorter spiky leaves below), pink rio dipladenia, a Cordyline Terminalis in the middle and a few others I’ll show below.

I bought 3 of each of these (mostly) since I have 3 larger planters. I have these 2 square planters and one round one and they are all gray in color. I like to plant a taller one in the middle with shorter to the sides, as well as a spiller. You’ve probably heard thriller, filler, and spiller when it comes to planting plants? It does work, although I don’t have a real spiller on these, but when they fill out you get different heights and the caladiums reach out to the sides, as do the Rios.

I also added some pink hued annuals to my smaller pots, these are portulaca and celosia.

More vinca in this pot. These are easy care plants and do well in sun or part shade and they bloom all summer.

These pots are filling out too! I added a vinca in here too.

Looks great right after planting, but after it fills out more, it’s even better as you will see below. You can see how the paint is chipping on my old planters. I did get the spray paint out to touch them up for this year.

The round planter with Cordyline, caladiums, Rio, and some Creeping Jenny that always comes back. It’s a good filler for a container.

The square planters right after planting. You can see my planters are not in great shape. I have had these square planters for 10 years at least and when we got the pool installed I spray painted them gray, but they aren’t holding up well, so I just bought these new gray plastic planters from Lowes that are self watering (they have a compartment at the bottom that holds water and you don’t have to water as often. Unfortunately the spray paint just doesn’t hold up forever outdoors. The new ones will be great when I plant next year. I’ll make do with these for this year and change them both out next year. Here are the planters I ordered in case you’re interested:

Square Gray planter from Lowes – These are 20″ x 20″ which is the same size I already had.

And for the first time ever, Mark and I planted a container garden. He had ordered this one from Amazon about 3 years ago and we never got around to planting it until this year. We bought Parks Whopper, Rutgers, Big Boy and Better Boy tomatoes, as well as basil and oregano in this bed.

I have a basil on the deck and one in the container garden since we love basil so much during summer.

You can see the patio all cleaned up below. It didn’t look like this before we started and every year we have to pressure wash the patio and everything down here to clean it all up. That’s about a 2 day project at least. But for now, it’s clean again and we are so happy to be in our backyard once more. My blue hydrangeas are doing great and blooming now. The white ones in the middle bloom a little later. You can see the container garden up above by the fence. That’s the only place we could put it with our sloping backyard and proximity to sun. It gets about 1/2 day of sun, so we hope it’s enough.

Here are the containers after a month of growing. I’m loving how they are filling out and look so lush now. We’ve gotten plenty of rain so I have hardly had to water them.

I love the pink and green combo, this look is what attracts me every year when I’m choosing plants and flowers. So don’t forget that you don’t have to do all flowers to make a container work. Sometimes just colorful leaves are a great complement to flowers. That’s why I love caladiums so much.

The only flowers I have in here are the vinca and Rio. I’m really loving the Cordyline this year, so I’m going to make a note to look for that again. Those vivid pink leaves coming out of the middle are so pretty.

The planters sure do make me happy during summer months!

And so do these hydrangeas!

After a freeze 2 years ago, they are coming back strong. I will definitely be cutting some to bring inside the house.

I’m so glad we can grow hydrangeas here.

And the little garden of tomatoes is growing too, we have 2 little ones now. Fingers crossed that we can produce more tomatoes this year.

My daddy would be proud! Wish I could show him and get some tips.

We sure hope to get our own crop of homegrown tomatoes this year, that sure would be nice. We are always out looking for tomatoes during the summer.

I love these coleus too, they are a different variety from what I’ve gotten before and I love the shape and colors. Grandkids in the pool last weekend.

That’s how I put my planters together and this shows how well they are doing now.

They are gorgeous if I do say so myself!

So that’s a look at the backyard blooms this year. We plan to be out here a lot!

In the front yard, I needed to fill in some bare spots where we had inherited knockout roses that got some kind of disease and died, so we cut them down. I added 3 of these pink and gold spirea and I hope they do well. So far so good. There’s a clematis vine in the back and Mark took down the old metal screen that they were climbing on, so I got a new metal obelisk for them to climb and I really like it. It was from Amazon.

So that’s a look at how I put my summer annual planters together and we enjoy them all the way til fall when the first frost comes along. I hope this gives you ideas of your own for planting beautiful blooms each summer!

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