Nice photos, and your plant does look ready to deadhead. Use your fingers, bend and snap the spent flower part at the very bottom (above the new leaves), being careful of the new foliage.

And it can be a sticky process; if I think of it and am not just tempted to do some deadheading when wandering in the garden, I put on latex surgical gloves. Try not to leave a glove stuck to your shrub...it's not a perfect solution :)

If there is anything about the shape of your young rhododendron you might want to improve, say if you have a longer stem that makes it look unbalanced to you, you can easily improve that now too by intentionally snapping off new foliage buds. Doing that now does not affect next year's blooming.

Thanks for your reply - let me get this straight.

I need to pinch, bend and snap the skinny, stringy, whitish looking parts. The spot at which they need to break is right where the whitish stringy meets the dark green 'string holder' that is coming off the new stem which is coming from the main limb of the plant?

For each bloom there will be 10 or so 'dead heads' to snap .. right?

No, not quite it. Snap the entire blooming truss structure off all at once. Each flower cluster, one place to snap and break all in one piece. leaving just clean new leaves.. We don't want you working all Spring on this, and with sticky fingers at that....

Looking at your first photo, pinch the base of the spent truss and bend, it should snap off, all of it, right at the point that your stem/string holder ( :) ) meets the new leaves. You won't be leaving anything above the newly emerging whorl of leaves.

Hi, I have been reading with great interest in how to deadhead my rhdo as well. Is the sticky on your rhdo from an insect, mealy bug or other? Mine is in bloom now and I didn't know what to expect once it's bloomed.........Wayne

Some of the sticky stuff is probably from nectar in the flowers. I know on my mom's rhodie, the bumble bees love the flowers!

The truss rhachis (flower-part stem/green string holder) on most elepidotes exudes a sticky substance that will stick to your fingers like glue. It's normal, not a disease or insect residue.

Here's another photo. Note the two new leaf buds that have fully opened on each side of the spent flower structure. It would have been easier to deadhead this plant without damaging new growth if it had been done slightly sooner, before the foliage buds were completely opened and extended. The longer you wait, the tougher it is to snap off.

Here is a link that might be useful: Another photo

Thanks to everybody for your advice and expertise. I bent and snapped all of the spent blooms from my Rhodie yesterday. A couple of times there was no way to avoid a situation where a small new branch ended up as a casualty but all in all, I think it was a successful first time.

What should I expect from these newly terminated ends? will a new bud begin to grow and sprout from that end next year?

With luck, a new litttle stem or stems will grow on either side of where you just broke off the spent flower - all this summer. Sometimes they even try to grow before the flower is finished.

pianoboy - Just as an illustration, I had some flower pics from my mom's rhodie a couple years ago (I saw a bumble bee working it and was trying to get a pic of it...lol). And one shows how the new stem growth comes out of a spot just below the flower head (it's the short stem with the smaller lighter green leaves on the left side of the flower):

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Sometimes there's no growth, sometimes 1 stem, sometimes 2 or more - I expect it depends on the cultivar, the weather, the condition of the rhodie itself, and/or whether the flower isn't interfering with the growth (thus the oft-recommended dead-heading).

Jenny, I have never, ever seen an incidence of the flower in some way restricting new growth. It doesn't happen. The deadheading is simply an energy saving measure.

I have seen it, experienced it on my own Herbert azalea, and have even read about it happening. There are all sorts of species of this genus out there so I would never make any assumptions about "never". ;-)

If my earlier post sounding curt, I didn't mean for it to.

The 'oft-recommended' suggestion to deadhead has nothing to do with the flower structure somehow impeding growth as it does not; saying otherwise could be confusing to those people newly growing these shrubs. Rhododendrons and azaleas will grow normally if deadheaded or not deadheaded, although the appearance of the plant looks decidely more messy with the browned flowers and later the seed caps still on it.

Rhodendendrons are prodigious seed setters, and the formation of quantities of seed take much of the energy the plant would otherwise utilize in forming flower buds for the next year. Failure to deadhead will lead to heavy flowering every other year with few blooms in between, especially on younger rhododendrons.

Deadheading can also be good sanitation. Wilted flower petals can possibly harbor fungi such as petal blight.

Not all rhododendrons are "prodigious seed setters" and there are plenty around here that have not seeded (as they are apparently self-incompatible) and have never been dead-headed - if anything because they are too large to do or they are growing wild in the woods. But it is good practice for the landscaped ones for appearances sake. ;-)