Those plants are really full and perfectly beautiful, Paul.

Wonderful looking, Paul. Mine got on the dry side, and are looking a little ratty.

wowza
y'all have such beautiful mums and beautiful gardens--now I am embarrassed to show what's going on here but here it is anyway

Matchsticks is a neat one; unfortunately I let the 'weeds' go and smothered mine with sunflowers and amaranth so I got about 10 blooms out of it this year


The old noid driveway mums...got these about 6-7 years ago when a neighbor was thinning his gardens and the only place I had to put them at the time was along the driveway (please excuse the other stuff and harsh light)

The pink one blooms early; my personal fave is the white spoon; and the tiny white-ish flowered thing just keeps going and going...


newer mums with names--all put in last fall when I went nuts and chopped down a bunch of trees and randomly threw some stuff in what was then open space
Michelle Gold; Babylon Bronze; Atomic Orange;

Rhumba--starts red then fades to a sort of terracotta blend


There is a reason I don't take many long range shots--I have trouble with backgrounds (junk, chainlink, neighbors, etc.,). Here I was trying to get a picture of the sage and my own jungle plus the neighbors houses was a problematic background so I just focused on it for some reason weird picture but that big fleshy thing in the middle is Rhumba and MG is the big yellow to the right in the shade


White Bomb is a Dendranthema weyrichii cultivar and should be a lot lower growing groundcover type mum, but mine got shamefully tall and floppy


And my latest bloomer is just starting

‘Hillside Sheffield Pink’ is an impressive space filler that blooms until it freezes and keeps the pollinators fed. (I don't like it with the orange zinnias, but they are filling space and feeding the bugs this year too )

Some nice shots there, dirtdolphins!

Super show there Paul and Dirtdorphins!!!!!!!

Nice...very nice, DD!

Rhumba is going on my wishlist, and I really like that white spoon as well.

Do you just shear all of those plants a few times throughout the summer to get them so full?

I saw this at Walmart, is it hardy?

gorgeous! but who can tell from a picture? not me--that's for sure. I'd try it, though, if I came across that one at Walmart

Chelle, I do pinch the the ones that I notice having long internodal growth spurts, (same with the tall asters) usually about three times by about mid-July and then I let them go. No schedule or anything--just when I'm out and about and I notice and it occurs to me to do it.

dirtdorphins said:

Chelle, I do pinch the the ones that I notice having long internodal growth spurts, (same with the tall asters) usually about three times by about mid-July and then I let them go. No schedule or anything--just when I'm out and about and I notice and it occurs to me to do it.

Thanks DD. Your explanation is wonderful.
For many years I'd read to "pinch them back", but putting that advice into practice wasn't so easy. When I had it in mind to do so the plants weren't yet having growth spurts -when next I noticed them, they'd already shot past the point where I felt it would help them. By that point, I thought it would be too late and that I'd not have blooms later if I did it then. I noticed this year that the ones potted up in the nursery were still nearly flat rosettes in July, so it seems that it's not too late to reduce (or to reduce again) even if there's still only 8 or so weeks left till bloom time.

Well forgot to not that the blooms were probably 3 inches or so across. Pretty good sized, so that led me to think probably a florist type and not hardy.

Frillylily said:Well forgot to not that the blooms were probably 3 inches or so across. Pretty good sized, so that led me to think probably a florist type and not hardy.

Well, it is hardy somewhere

ha ha. I got a comedian on my hands...

Here is one that survived from last year, NOID. Need to move to full sun and make cuttings.
I love pink

For the past two years, the nice full garden mums that I cave-in and buy at the grocery store for some late color have only stayed nice a couple weeks, then all the blooms turn brown and the plants look terrible. This year I am shearing them to see if I can coax additional blooms before they really go belly up for the winter. I should probably try to over-winter them, which is certainly possible in my zone. Perhaps if they were grown in-ground rather than coming from a greenhouse, they would bloom better?

Yes. Deadhead them and they'll bloom again. It's not always immediate, but I had two experimental plants that I allowed to begin blooming in August, and with deadheading they're still blooming. Some dollar plants from a BB store are behaving the same way. The new blooms aren't all nice and evenly distributed like they were in the beginning, but they're still giving some late season color.

It might also have something to do with the type of flower...
For me, all the compact, tiny button, poof-ball types (I think they might call them pom-pom) tend to look nice very briefly and then crap out, even when they are not greenhouse grown, simply because they bloom all at once *and* the flowers don't last very long--literally about 10 days max for me.
Whereas with most of the daisy types and even many of the larger flowered decorative types, the flowers last longer and they tend to stagger their bloom better.
For example, the driveway whities posted above--those pics were taken 10-7, 10-10. They started blooming around the end of September. Here they are now, after prolonged drought, wicked wind, and frost--aging pink, and still technically opening a few new blooms

They don't look great by any means, but practically speaking they do look better than my button mums which have been all brown for a while now.

I am really admiring this one now, which is going gonzo in the sun

I threw a tiny piece in a shady spot last fall, just to see if it could be tamed a little


well, a little I guess, and it sure brightens up that shady hole

I understand from Bluestone the best time to plant mums to winter over is in the spring. The fall ones don't usually winter over well, you might get some lanky stalks. Bluestone sells them in the spring, I'm going to try getting some then. And you need to keep pinching them back.

This advice may be for us northerners. I think Bluestone is in Ohio.

Even in the south I plant my mums in the spring. Here are two I planted in the spring from Bluestone. They are past their prime right now.

Still looking good, though.