As for the blooming, encore azaleas have a Spring and Fall blooming cycle. Usually, a light pruning commonly referred to as "deadheading" is done after the Spring blooming begins to fade. This is done to keep the hormone levels in the plant from shifting. The blooming activity is part of the plants reproduction, so once the blooms fully mature and begin to fade, the plant is triggered to slow down the production of the bloom producing hormones. So once your flowers weather a bit, simply prune just below the first set of leaves nearest the bloom each Spring. This will improve your Fall blooming cycle significantly. Also, use your winter months to replenish the phosphate levels, which are usually depleted by heavy blooming cycles.

I'm in the Atlanta area, but you're welcome to visit my webpage and link to the Facebook page. I keep an open log on Facebook with pests and problems I find in the field, and what can be done to avoid the problems. There are several photos with various pests that go after Azaleas. While lace bugs are the most common, my favorite is of a wooly aphid I found last Spring.

The spring bloom is produced by buds that were set last year, so any buds you cut off will reduce your spring bloom. The summer/fall bloom is on new growth, so that may actually be better since pruning tends to stimulate new growth.

Usually deadheading is done by picking spent flowers off before they form seed pods. This conserves the energy in the plant. This is much easier in rhododendrons than azaleas. I can see where some people would prune off the spent flowers. This is especially important if you are bothered by petal blight, a fungus disease that causes premature wilt of rhododendron and azalea flowers. With petal blight, the blossoms get spots that are sort of watery, then turn brown, and just lie on the plant and are reluctant to fall off. A normal blossom usually wilts while still its normal color and falls off. Petal blight normally doesn't get established early in the season, but later blooming varieties and encore type azaleas are hit from mid-spring through the summer.

Once you have petal blight, it comes back from spores from spent flower petals that were diseased from prior seasons. It is worst in warm weather with heavy rains just before the flower buds open. Hence, it hits late blooming azaleas worst including Encore Azaleas. So the removal and destruction of all diseased spent flowers is very important to control petal blight.