Gadenin日本語Get the appDeadhead at the base of the stalk, not by picking off the petals
This is the single job that decides how long your plants flower, and most people do it wrong. Each pansy flower sits on its own long slender stalk that runs all the way down to the crown of the plant. When the bloom is finished, follow that stalk down with your fingers to where it emerges from the base and pinch or snip it off there. What you remove should be a length of bare stalk with a dead flower on the end, not just a handful of crumpled petals.
The reason the distinction matters is that the seed pod forms at the base of the flower, where the petals were attached. Pull the petals off and you leave the pod behind on the plant. Within two weeks that pod swells into a fat green capsule, and from the plant's point of view the job is done: it has set seed, and the signal to keep producing buds is switched off. A pansy carrying half a dozen swelling pods slows visibly, and one allowed to ripen a full crop of them stops flowering altogether and starts to yellow, whatever you feed it.
Go over the plants twice a week and it takes five minutes. Leave it for a fortnight and you are removing pods rather than spent flowers, and the plant has already lost its momentum. In a container of a dozen plants at peak flowering this is genuinely the difference between a display that runs from autumn through to late spring and one that is over before winter is out.
- Find the flower stalk, not the flower Take the faded bloom between finger and thumb and slide your other hand down its stalk until you reach the crown of the plant. That whole stalk comes off, which is usually three to five inches (7 to 12 cm) of stem.
- Pinch it off flush at the base Snap it sideways at the point it joins the crown, or use scissors if the plant is soft and tears easily. Leaving a stub of stalk standing does no harm, but leaving the swollen green pod on the top of it defeats the exercise.
- Take the fat green pods too Any capsule that has already formed and turned upward on its stalk should come off in the same pass. Removing it late still helps; the plant restarts within a week or two.
- Clear the debris out of the crown Spent flowers that lodge among the leaves stay wet after rain and start rot in the center of the plant. Pull them out while you are there.
- Repeat twice a week in the flowering season Twice weekly keeps you ahead of the seed pods. Once a fortnight does not, because a pod takes roughly ten days to form and start acting on the plant.
Water and feed for steady growth, not a growth spurt
Pansies want soil that stays evenly damp and never sits wet. In the ground in a cool season that often means no watering at all for weeks at a time, because rain does the work and the plants transpire very little at low temperatures. In containers it means checking rather than watering to a schedule: push a finger an inch (2.5 cm) into the compost, and water thoroughly only when it comes out dry. Watering a cold wet pot on a fixed weekly rhythm is how most container pansies are killed, and they die from the crown down, going brown and soft right at soil level.
Water at the base of the plant and not over the top. Pansy flowers are thin and they mark badly, and the foliage is dense enough at the crown that overhead water lingers there through a cool night. Both leaf spot and crown rot start in that permanently damp center.
Feed lightly and often rather than heavily and rarely. A balanced liquid feed at half strength every two weeks through the flowering season suits them. High nitrogen produces exactly the wrong plant: large soft leaves, long stems, few flowers, and tissue that is far more attractive to aphids and far less able to take a hard frost. If your plants are all leaf and no bloom and you have been deadheading properly, the feed is the thing to change.
| Condition | Watering | Feeding |
|---|---|---|
| In the ground, cool damp weather | None needed; rain is enough | Half strength liquid feed every two to three weeks |
| In the ground, dry spell | A deep soak once a week | As above; do not feed a dry plant |
| Container, cool weather | Only when the top inch (2.5 cm) is dry | Half strength every two weeks |
| Container, mild warm spell | Check daily; small pots dry fast | Half strength every two weeks |
| Hard frost forecast | Water in the morning if dry, never at dusk | Stop feeding until the cold passes |
| Plants yellowing with pale new leaves | Unchanged | Feed is overdue, or the compost is exhausted |
Write down the date you last fed each container. Pansies are grown over months when little else is happening in the garden, and the feed that is easiest to forget is the one in the middle of winter, which is exactly the one that decides whether the plants surge in spring or limp.
Cut a leggy plant back by half and it comes back
Sooner or later a pansy stretches. The stems lengthen, the leaves become sparse along them, the flowers move outward and sit on long floppy stalks, and the middle of the plant opens up into a bare tangle. This happens in warm spells, in low light, after heavy nitrogen feeding, and simply from age after a long flowering run. It is not a disease and no amount of feeding reverses it.
Cut the whole plant back by half. That means taking a plant eight inches (20 cm) across and reducing it to a compact four inch (10 cm) mound of short leafy stems. It looks drastic and almost nobody wants to do it, which is why so many pansies are pulled out and replaced when they did not need to be. Cut just above a leaf joint on each stem, leaving at least two or three joints with leaves on every stem you shorten, and never cut back into a bare woody base with no growth points on it.
Water the plant well the day before, cut on a mild day rather than into a freeze, and give a half strength feed straight afterwards. New shoots break from the joints you left within seven to ten days, and the plant is flowering again in two to three weeks, denser than it was because each cut stem produces two new ones. A plant cut back in early spring after a long winter will usually give a better display in late spring than it managed at any point before.
Light, heat and where the plants sit
Pansies flower best in full sun during cool weather and want partial shade once it turns warm, which is an awkward combination to arrange in one position. In practice, a spot that gets full morning sun and shade from the middle of the afternoon suits them across the whole of their season, and it is worth choosing the position on that basis rather than on midwinter light alone.
In deep shade they keep growing but the stems lengthen, the flower count drops sharply, and the plants become leggy months earlier than they need to. Four hours of direct light is about the practical minimum. If a container is flowering thickly on one side and bare on the other, turn it a quarter turn every few days.
Heat is what ends them. Pansies flower hardest between about 40F and 65F (4C and 18C). Once daytime temperatures sit consistently above 75F (24C) the plants stretch, the flowers shrink, the colors wash out and the whole thing collapses within a few weeks. Moving containers into shade and cutting back by half buys some time, but it only ever delays the end. Plan the season around that fact rather than fighting it.
Note the week your plants first looked stretched and washed out, and what the weather was doing. In your own conditions that point arrives at much the same time each year, and knowing it tells you when to cut back in advance and when to give up and replant.