Lawn Care Tips - Pruning Your Pansies
Posted by Kathy Wilder on Wed, Mar 16, 2011
Lawn Care Tips – Pruning Your Pansies
It’s almost spring! I have some hostas coming up, I’ve already
been browsing the flowers at Lowe’s, and I can’t wait to get out there and dig in the dirt! Right now, my flowerbeds are full of leaves and junk, but my pansies don’t seem to mind – they are happily blooming away. If you planted pansies last fall, they probably look pretty good right now.
Before I mulched mine for the winter, I noticed they were getting long and scraggly – especially since leaves kept falling on them, and they were reaching for the sunlight. A good way to take care of this, and to insure that you have bushy, healthy plants with lots of flowers, is to cut off the stem of a flower (after it has wilted) about ¼” above the first leaf below the flower. Your plants will keep their shape and flower more profusely! You can do this now if you need to, or later in the spring if they start to get “leggy.” Your pansies will also bloom more if you cut off the seed heads.
Pansies should be fertilized once every 4 weeks while actively growing – a light 10-10-10 fertilizer is sufficient. Pansies in pots and containers may need fertilizer a little more frequently – in fact, you can mix up some watered-down water-soluble potted plant or houseplant fertilizer (about ¼ of the monthly application rate to one gallon water) and just water your potted pansies with that.
Here are some sites that address pansy care in more detail:
How To Prune Pansies from eHow.com
How To Cut Back Pansies from gardenguides.com
NOTE: a good thing about pansies, or other winter and early spring bloomers is that you can plant SUN plants in SHADE places, because all the leaves are off your trees. I have a large shade garden under an oak tree where I plant bulbs like daffodils. When the daffodils are done blooming, the hostas are coming up. I just cut off the foliage from the daffodils, and the hostas take over. It’s like a 2-in-1 garden!
