As you relax in your garden with a frosty drink, your imagination may be planning for beautiful months ahead on these hot July days.
How will your borders look next spring? What to plant? Where? What would make a lovelier spring picture than blue and white pansies at the feet of golden daffodils or a pansy border for rosy azaleas?
The blue of Virginia bluebells in the rock garden looks even bluer when contrasted with a drift of white pansies as a ground cover.
Tall tulips hook less leggy with velvety pansies blooming lavishly below them. Generous patches of pansies planted near the roots of a hedge or shrub border add bold accents of color.
Perhaps you bought a basket or two of pansy plants at Easter Time to set into your garden. This year, for the same price, why not start thousands of these smiling flowers to carpet your beds and add touches of color to your rock garden and shrub border next spring?
Since pansies are biennials that thrive during the cool fall and spring seasons, July and August are the months to start plants from seed in most parts of the country. However, the Deep South sowing should be postponed until September or October.
Selecting Seed
First, buy the best seed obtainable. Cheap seed is a false economy, as it rarely produces the largest flowers or the most tempting and unusual shades.
You will find a wide assortment of colors, shading, and petal formation by looking through seed catalogs of reliable companies or contacting pansy specialists.
Choosing The Coolest and Most Sunny Spot
Next, choose the coolest yet sunny spot in your yard for your pansy bed or flat. A cold frame is ideal.
Temperatures ranging from 50° at night to 75° degrees Fahrenheit at the hottest part of the day are best for rapid germination and growth.
Since pansies are heavy feeders from the start, give them rich soil – a good loam to which generous amounts of well-rotted manure, peat moss, and compost have been added.
Work in equal parts of bone meal and a complete commercial fertilizer at the rate of 3 pounds per 100 square feet.
Soil Preparation
Pulverize the soil to a depth of several inches, level, water well with a fine spray, and then let it stand for several days.
This waiting period gives weed seeds a chance to sprout; you can kill the “weedlings” by raking the bed and exposing them to the burning rays of the sun for a few hours.
Then reveal the surface of the bed. Dust the pansy seed with a fungicidal disinfectant, such as Arasan, to help prevent “damping off” and other soil-borne infections.
Broadcast or Sow Seeds
Broadcast the seeds or sow them in drills about 6” inches apart. Cover them lightly with sifted soil, sand, sphagnum moss, or vermiculite.
Sprinkle with a fine spray. Keep the soil evenly moist but not soaked until the seeds have germinated (about 8 to 14 days) and the plants are growing well.
Proper Moisture and Shading
The proper amount of moisture is crucial. If the soil dries out, even for a short period, many sprouting plants may be killed.
Shading the bed with a piece of burlap or sheeting gives protection from the scorching sun and searing winds.
Place this covering directly over the seed bed. As soon as the seedlings begin to come up, raise the covering to shade them; when the plants are growing well, remove the canopy completely.
Keep the bed weeded and thin the plants if they are crowding each other. You can leave the pansies in the seedbed until spring, or for earlier blooms, you can transplant the seedlings when they have their third or fourth leaves to their permanent location in the garden.
Try to move them just before or after a rain. Take a generous hall of soil with the roots, and reset in good-sized holes.
Water To Avoid Shock
Water each transplanted plant with one cupful of a “starter” solution to avoid as much shock as possible. (Dissolve 3 to 4 tablespoons of a complete commercial fertilizer in a gallon of water several hours before using.)
If there is much wilting, shade the plants with inverted baskets or hotkaps.
Pansies will grow in semi-shade or even tolerate full shade but plant them in a sunny spot for best results. Work humus and fertilizer into the soil so that it is a rich, porous loam.
Transplanting in September
Do your transplanting during September or, at the latest, the first part of October so the plants can become well-established before the cold weather.
By the time cold weather comes, the seedlings will be husky plants with lush, deep green foliage and perhaps a bud or two. If given light and loose mulch, the pansies will live over the winter well.
Since the leaves stay green, this covering should be salt hay, evergreen houghs, or any other material which will not pack down and smother the plants.
If your pansies are in a cold frame, cover them with the sash for the winter, but raise it on warm days to give some ventilation.
As soon as the first warm days of spring have melted the snow, the pansies will be pushing up through the mulch. Remove the covering, and in no time at all, they will be turning their gay, laughing faces to the sun.
Water Plants Thoroughly
Pick them often for cheerful little bouquets or as bright lapel corsages to accent your spring suit; they’ll bloom all the more – until hot weather scorches them.
By watering the plants thoroughly, you may be able to keep some of them until fall.
When cooler weather starts, cut back some foliage to stimulate bloom.
44659 by Jeannette Lowe