A Simple Way To Reuse Dead Flowers To Help Your Garden Grow

With most flowers in the garden, deadheading is a great way to help them keep blooming again and again. Deadheading is an easy process where you remove the spent flower head after it starts to fade, with your hands or a pruner tool. Learning how to deadhead flowers for a thriving garden is an essential task for a gardener. However, regularly removing all the old flowers from your garden results in a lot of waste. Instead of throwing those dead flowers away, there's an easy way to reuse them in the garden. Composting your spent flower heads is quick and doesn't take extra time if you've already set up a compost bin. 

Many gardeners throw away their old flower heads in the trash. But these spent blooms are full of excellent organic matter that you can use to improve the long-term health of your soil. When you compost dead flowers, you are breaking them down into rich organic matter that can be spread back on your flower beds. It's an excellent cycle of death and rebirth that will leave your flower beds looking better than ever year after year. Similar to repurposing an old tree stump for nutrient-rich soil in your raised garden bed, reusing dead flowers is ideal if you want to avoid creating waste.

If you do compost your dead flowers, make sure you know what you're doing. When composting flowers, you need to decide if they are green or brown compost. Green compost is fresh, living organic matter. Very fresh flowers that still have color and moisture can be classified as green matter. Old, dried flowers that died back a while ago are considered brown organic matter. Adding green compost to your bin provides nitrogen, while brown adds carbon. Both are necessary for organic matter to break down, so try to balance out your pile with both types. For example, after adding a layer of freshly cut marigolds to the pile, plan on throwing in a layer of dried marigold flowers, fallen leaves, newspaper, or other brown compost. 

There are also some flowers you should perhaps avoid throwing into the compost bin. The flower heads of spent roses make a fine addition, but be careful that none of their thorns get into the pile. Thorns do not compost as quickly as other matter. Among other things you should never put in your compost bin, avoid throwing in flowers from plants that might be diseased. The disease can linger on the flowers, infecting the bin, and eventually moving into the garden beds where you spread the finished compost. Also be wary of trying to compost store-bought cut flowers. Sometimes these flower heads have chemicals that you likely don't want being spread back on your garden beds.