You know you should water and weed, but you may not know that deadheading is the way to keeping flowers blooming. A favorite task of serious gardeners, deadheading means removing dead or faded flowers, which encourages many perennials and annuals to flower longer and grow fuller. Here's how to snip every type of stem.

1. Removing the flower

Best for: The majority of plants that have both spent flowers and new buds or leaves on the same stem, such as delphinium, daisy, yarrow, purple cone-flower, cosmos, and petunia.
How: Pinch or use pruners to cut off the dead flower stem above the first new flower or bud. If no buds exist, snip above the highest leaf.

2. Removing the stem (shown)

Best for: Plants with a single flower stem, such as bleeding heart, hosta, coralbell, lady's mantle, and peony.
How: When all flowering is finished, cut the stalk off close to the ground. If you want to thin regrowth of wide-growing plants, carefully pull the stems out by the root.

3. Shearing back a cluster

Best for: Compact mounds or clumps of flowering plants that would be too tedious to prune at each individual stem or bud, such as catmint, dianthus, Johnny-jump-up, and sweet alyssum.
How: If the mound is compact but many of the flowers are wilted, use garden shears to cut back the entire mound only at the top. If the plant has thinned or become leggy due to a lack of leaves on the lower stems, cut to the ground and then coddle the plant back to lushness with plenty of water and liquid fertilizer.