How to Prune Salvia to Get Continuous Blooms Learned this by Accident My Selective Pruning Method

Hi, it's Steph. Welcome back to my garden. Today I'm going to show you how I prune my salvia to keep blooms coming all summer long. My salvia in my garden is at different stages at the moment and that's depending on how much light it's getting on this walkway. So I'm going to show you an example of three salvias and at what stage of bloom they are and when it's the perfect time to go in and give them their prune. This salvia right here is still pretty good. It has a lot of bloom life left in it. The blooms start at the bottom and they work their way up. So this one you can see still has more than half with blooms on it. So this one is not ready to be pruned. This salvia here is a little bit further along where now it only has blooms at the tip. So you can see that this one within a few days will be a good candidate to be cut back. And lastly I'll show you one that is currently ready to be cut back. Now this salvia here is one that is what I would consider completely spent and what that means is now there are no longer any blooms. See how there's a couple of stalks that still has a little bit of blooms on top? Now the bees love these plants so within a couple of days the bees will work on this and this will be completely done and look like this. Now in the past what I would do is and what most people do is I would hack down this plant or cut it down all the way to the base to where the foliage starts but then I would end up with a blank slate. Basically there'd be nothing here. This spot would be empty for the couple of weeks that it would take for this salvia to flush back out. So I learned something accidentally last year and I'm going to tell you what that is. So here's my new method. This plant is not yet completely spent. In fact it just has a little bit left on the tips of the bloom still showing in the color. So what I'm going to do is I'm going cut just half of the plant and it doesn't matter which half you cut. You can do the back, you can do the front. The point is to leave half intact that still has some blooms and cut the other half. This way you have a continuous cycle of blooms always coming up from the plant. So I'm going to go ahead and prune just the front of this plant and the good thing about this is that now you're not ending up with a blank spot in your garden and you have a continuous succession of blooms always coming up for you which will extend your blooming season. Here is everything that I pruned off of this salvia and you can see that I pruned off the front of the plant but I still have some bloom spikes here so in essence I don't have a blank spot and I still have some color until I wait for the second flush to come up. When I pruned the other salvia I showed you my technique and then I had done I pruned the front and left the back intact. With this one here I wasn't able to do a front and back so what I did was I pruned half on this side and I left this side intact. There's really no rules you know it's kind of like cooking you just do what feels right. So I'm going to go ahead and finish pruning up the rest of these salvias and today is June 15th so I'll come back in two to three weeks when they've had a chance to flush back out and give you an update. As I'm pruning I noticed that there is already some new growth coming in on some of these salvias so I'm just going to be very selective about where I prune. Today is July 1st it's been exactly two weeks since we pruned back the salvia so you can see now that it's starting to flush back out so what I'm going to do is I'm going to finish trimming the back side of the plant now so that that will put on some new blooms in the next couple of weeks and this is how we keep the cycle going so that we can prolong the bloom of our salvia throughout the summer. Prolonging my salvia blooms throughout the summer so give it a shot let me know what you think thanks for watching I'll catch you in the next one