Pansies are tough little flowers that are reliable and steadfast. It is not necessary to pull up your pansies when the blooms slow down. With a little care they will have a second round of flowering.
Pansies love cool weather. They are some of the first plants for sale in the spring, and they will bloom again and again until the summer heat comes. I have an overlapping cycle I use to grow pansies so there are always some blooming, except during the heat of summer and the dead of winter. Pansies are annuals, but they will tolerate a kind of pseudo-dormancy where they just stay on hold until the weather changes.
General Pansy Tips to Extend Their Blooming Season
Keep faded flowers nipped off, and if the plants get leggy, trim back the long branches.
Soil temperature is important for pansies. If they are in full sun in a pot, the soil will heat up even if the air temperature is not excessively warm. Move potted pansies out of the direct sun on very warm days to keep the soil cool.
Maintain evenly moist soil. It should never be soggy, and never be dry. Watering lowers the soil temperature, and I sometimes water pansies during the warmest part of the day just to cool things down.
As summer draws near, relocate pots of pansies and place them in filtered light or in shade. If your pansy foliage begins to have a reddish or brownish tinge, it may be getting sunburned.
When hot weather arrives for good, trim your pansies back to 4 – 5 inches tall. Continue to fertilize with a weak balanced fertilizer (5-5-5) every couple of weeks, and make sure the soil stays moist and never dries out. Dilute the fertilizer to about half the recommended strength. Keep your pansies in a cool spot with filtered sunlight or light shade.
Try using pansies in landscaping under shrubs and around taller perennials. They will be blooming in the spring when the other plants are just getting started, and the taller plants will offer some shade to keep the pansies cooler during summer heat. Shrubs and perennials will use lots of water, so make sure your pansies are getting their share.
My Pansy Planting Cycle
Set out pansies as early in the spring as you can work the ground. Either start them earlier from seed or buy plants. These will grow and bloom all spring. Trim them back as suggested above when summer heat arrives.
As summer wanes, your pansies will revive. You’ll notice that there are new leaves and branches beginning in mid to late August. Change the fertilizer to one with a higher phosphorus ratio (5-10-5), or simply add a light dusting of bone meal to the top of the soil around your pansies. I use fish emulsion fertilizer and a dusting of bone meal. Within 3 – 4 weeks your pansies should have some buds and flowers. Keep them deadheaded and they will continue to bloom until a hard freeze, usually late November or early December here in southern Indiana. Frost usually does not harm pansies.
Start the second leg of the cycle in late August. Plant some pansy seeds either in pots or in the ground. These should bloom late in the fall. Now you’ll have spring planted and fall planted pansies blooming until late fall.
After the second round of blooms, your spring planted pansies are done for. But your fall plants can be saved over the winter. After a hard freeze, remove the dead branches from your fall planted pansies, and place a three or four inch layer of mulch over the roots. If they are in pots, remove the dead branches, mulch them, and move the pots to a sheltered area. Monitor the pots and occasionally water them sparingly during the winter, just enough to make sure they don’t dry out. You don’t want wet soil freezing into a huge ice cube, either.
You now have four month old pansies which will grow and bloom again in the early spring. Plant new pansies again in the spring to keep the cycle going.
So the cycle is to plant in the spring for spring and fall blooms. Plant in the fall for fall and spring blooms. Each planting will give you two rounds of blooms.
If you use open-pollinated (heirloom) varieties of pansies, you can save a few seeds from each season’s flowers to replant the next season.
