Pinching Mums

One of the most beautiful fall blooming flowers is the chrysanthemum, with its gorgeous blooms in various colors. To get those beautiful full mums, you must do some maintenance work throughout the summer growing season. Mums need to be pinched or pruned back several times, so you get a compact plant with multiple flowers per stem instead of getting several tall branches with flowers. You should start pinching mums from when they first started growing; however, you can still pinch mums back till about the fourth of July without causing a loss of bloom. As mums put on about two to four inches of growth, we should go in with scissors or garden shears and trim those mums back to encourage the secondary buds to put on new development, and give you that bushy, compact plant at the end of the season with lots of blooms all over the plant. For more information on pinching back mums and to watch how to do it, check out this video on the Kansas Healthy Yards website.

 

Have questions? Contact our office where our Horticulture Extension Agent will assist you with questions.

Phone: (316) 321-9660

Email: callae@ksu.edu