Tips for Pruning Mums
It is necessary to prune your mums to ensure their maximum health. Fortunately, this is not by any means a difficult task. Chrysanthemums are wonderful flowers to grow in any garden. You can expect lovely the blooms that appear throughout the spring season to return even more vibrant the following year.
Pruning of chrysanthemums should be done prior to the blooming season in the spring. Use a pair of sharp scissors and protect your hands with gardening gloves while you work. To start the pruning, you can deadhead your mums, which means to cut off the buds from flowers prior to blooming. This will ensure that your chrysanthemums will grow and thrive even better.
Another reason to prune your mums is so that you can eliminate any parts of the plant that are damaged or stricken by disease. Avoid exposing your plants to an excess of water for too long, as this will adversely affect them and invite disease.
Pruning of chrysanthemums can also be for aesthetic purposes, to properly shape your plants. This will retain the natural beauty of your mums in addition to encouraging the growth of new and healthy stems and buds in the next growing season.
In addition to pruning with scissors, you can also use the pinching method on your mums. In order to effectively to do this, you should use your thumb and forefinger, or the nails on each of those fingers, to literally pinch off at least one-half of new growths from the tops of your mums' shoots. This can be done when your plants have reached a height of four to six inches, and you can repeat this process in the summer as well. This will encourage the growth of new and healthy branches on plants that tend to grow in a more bushy fashion.
