Cut Short

 The main thing I miss about my desk job now that I'm entering my third year of retirement is my lunch hour, particularly during Greenhouse Season.  I used to spend my time visiting four or five different greenhouses two or three times a week during the main planting season.  This allowed me to search the corners, research items I wasn't sure about, and catch things in their prime as they came off the truck fresh from the growers.  Long ago I learned to have some flexibility in my shopping list.  You just can't count on other people to grow exactly what you want.  The last thing on my annual  plants list this year was a blue flowered spiller for the tall container in front of the garden shed.  I would have loved to find Cobalt Blue Superbena but that was unlikely to happen, so I was happy enough to find Easy Wave Plum Vein Petunia at Home Depot.  I would have preferred a Supertunia with their brilliant colors, but Waves are now an old standby and you can usually find them in a useful range of colors.

They were a little bedraggled.  Wave Petunias are a long trailing, aggressive growing plant and growers are often slow to cut off blooms that will show the consumer the color of the bloom.  It took me awhile to choose the best pack but I knew that as soon as I got them home I was going to give them a major haircut and I wanted plants that were putting out multiple stems at the base.

Its tough enough to disentangle them from their neighbors in the tray and then you have to get them out of the cells.  Once you get them home you can cut the cells off of them to get them out.  It seemed like I was cutting all of the pretty off of them, but when I was done I had some pretty decent looking plants.

I put one in each front corner of this planter.

This left me with extra so I put one in the cement urn in front of the garage, and planted the last three in the landscape where I have enjoyed wave petunias before.  

There are a lot of annuals that really benefit from a good hard trim, and petunias are at the top of the list.  If you want to know more about trimming back petunias and other annuals, I found this video on YouTube to calm my nerves before I started snipping away.