I have a pair of bypass pruners here and a pair of regular old kitchen shears. What we want to do to help reduce shock to this plant is actually disbud and take off the stems of the flowers that are in bloom right now. Now, there's no sense to waste anything because they are so lovely and they make wonderful cut flowers. What you can do is just pick off some of the extra leaves on there. With your scissors if you cut them on an angle just like that and quickly put it into a vase of water with a little bit of lemon juice, that will break the air bubble in the stem and you can make a lovely arrangement for your table and enjoy these flowers continually. I never like to waste anything so we're just going to put a few of these here in the vase while I'm trimming back the remaining stems of this plant. It's a fairly large rudbeckia plant here. It's gotten fairly overgrown and it's growing into my Russian sage. I do need to dig up some of it to move it to a new location. Here again, I'm stripping all bottom leaves. This will make the flower last a lot longer while it's in the vase of water. Here again, I'm cutting the stem on an angle. The reason why I do that is so that there is as much stem that can soak up water. If you do just a blunt cut, they won't be able to draw the water up as easily. You can see with just a few of these flowers you can get a lovely table arrangement. Black-eyed Susans are also wonderful because they are a cut and come again flower. Even though you trim off some flowers, you'll get some more throughout the season because they're a continual perennial. We're going to take off a few more here and I think we're good for our next step.
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