moss rose
- Kongmoss rose
Summertime, and the livin’ is hot and humid. Ticks pinch me and I pinch them off. A safer and less annoying pinching job is pinching back your annuals. If plants, like petunias or the moss rose in the photo, start to look pale, ragged, leggy and have no or anemic looking blooms, get up the nerve to do a little surgery. I used to be not confident, thinking I’d pinch back too much or the remove wrong thing. I figured out that plants are not little kittens and instead of hating you for life, plants will reward you with new green foliage and a new flush of blossoms. What you’re about to do is no worse than what a wind storm or hungry bug would do. Go ahead and use your fingernails. Your plants won’t hold it against you.
Here’s why pinching helps instead of hurts. Kong would tell you, but as you can see, she’s busy doing other things. Plants live to reproduce. When a plant is damaged it produces a hormone that makes it flower again. If the plant can think, it’s thinking, “I’m dying. I have to reproduce myself before it’s too late.” In the deep South, where I used to live, people beat their okra with sticks. They’ll tell you it makes the okra produce again, but most don’t know why. They’ve seen their parents and grandparents do this and it works, so they do it, too. It works because of the hormone released by the damage. Both hurricanes Katrina and Rita were like giant sticks beating up the plants. Everywhere was devastation and all the spring flowering trees bloomed. Peaches, crab apples, redbuds, everything, even though it was near autumn. They thought they were dying so they had to reproduce.
Now, if you think you should go out and punch your peachtree in August to make it bloom, think again. They haven’t stored enough energy to do this over and over. Once the Rita and Katrina trees bloomed in the fall, most of them didn’t have the energy to try again until spring a year later. But your annuals, pinch them all you want.
