Prune Geraniums

Geraniums can look scraggly if they're not properly attended to and pruned regularly. Keeping them in great shape will repay dividends in having a neat, thriving, and pleasant plant in your garden.

Steps

 * 1) Understand the purpose of pruning geraniums. Basically, you are seeking to:
 * 2) *Keep the plant compact and shapely
 * 3) *Produce plenty of fresh growth and leaves
 * 4) *Maintain the free-flowering nature of the plant.
 * 5)  Prune at the right time of year. The best time to tidy up geranium plants is autumn or winter. This will encourage spring and summer flowers.
 * 6)  Remove the head and wood from old, lanky and overgrown plants. Cut out all the stems off bar three or four.
 * 7)  Cut the remaining stems.
 * 8) *For garden geraniums or zonal pelargoniums, cut to 4–5"/ 8-12 cm above the ground.
 * 9) * For the regal pelargoniums, cut the remaining stems a little longer.
 * 10) *In the case of ivy pelargoniums, only thin the dead stems out and cut only if needed and do a basic external trimming.
 * 11)  Pinch out some vegetative buds and young shoots during summer. Doing this will help make compact growth and encourage winter flowering.
 * 12)  Lightly fork the garden bed around the geraniums after pruning.
 * 13)  Repeat the trimming in the following years. In this way, you can maintain a desired shape and the future prunings won't need to be as drastic as the first one.

Tips

 * Cut back the leading shoots of young plants that you have recently established from cuttings; this will encourage branching. Remove any unwanted stems by thinning them out.

Things You'll Need

 * Secateurs or pruning implement
 * Mulching capacity for cuttings
 * Garden fork

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