How to Keep Pansies Alive

Pansy flowers are often the first flowers home gardeners buy every spring, and then the first garden flowers to struggle and die. As soon as warm weather sets in pots, baskets and gardens filled with pansies drop their flowers and their green leaves begin to wither up and die. The same cycle happens again in the fall.

Every year neighbors and friends want to know how to keep their pansies alive longer and producing flowers after their first bouquet. Your pansies do not have to disappear with each season, and are actually well suited to multi-seasonal growing with a little help. Here are a few gardening tips to keep your pansies alive.

Know Your Plant
The pansy flower that you bring home can make a huge difference in how well it flourishes in your garden bed. Know what variety you have purchased, or seek out those varieties that are grown to be especially heat or cold tolerant. Universal Plus is a good option for just about every time zone because it is meant to be grown as an evergreen that is able to tolerate colder temperature days and survive through summer heat.

Prep Your Soil for Success
You cannot expect to grow healthy plants without healthy soil, so before you add your pansy flowers to any garden setting, be it a bed, border, container or basket, make sure you are using healthy soil. Pansies prefer, loose, well drained soil that is rich in nutrients so make sure you plant in loamy soil and either add organic compost or prep the soil with fertilizer that is rich in nitrogen and phosphorous.

Water Generously
Peonies are much like trees, in that they need to absorb a lot of water in order to survive the changes in seasons. This means that before cold weather hits, you need to provide your peony plants with all the water they are going to need to keep blooming over the next three to four weeks. If you did not add fertilizer to the soil prior to planting, make sure you give them a does of plant food by mid fall in order to revive both the foliage and flowers.

Cutting Back Creates More Flowers
Most gardeners plant their pansies and then forget about them, but this is a huge part of the reason why they die early and almost certainly why they are spent after a single season and rush of flower blooms. Pansies benefit from healthy pruning off the stem and leaves, deadheading is not enough, so grab your pruners after that first flush and snip above the first or second set of healthy leaves. Remove anything that is withered, dying or resembles a leggy offshoot. Remember, this should only be done at the end of your plants full bloom, in order to encourage it to come back to life through the next season.

Deadhead In Season
While your pansies are blooming, deadhead spent flowers in order to encourage more blooms. Like other flowers, this guarantees that your flowers will keep blooming and might even bloom more than they did the first time around. Deadhead right before they are entirely spent and you have a cute bouquet for your windowsill too!