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Our cool spring has kept pansies behind schedule, but the drier weather we experienced over the past week has pushed most pansies into full bloom. It’s always hard to wait through winter for pansies to come out of hibernation, and this year the wait was even longer than usual. Fortunately, the bloom is now developing well.
Pansies are very cold-hardy, so the cold February did not damage them, it simply delayed their spring bloom. However, while they tolerate cold well, the consistently wet conditions typical of winter often lead to disease. This issue is most prominent in poorly draining, shady beds and in areas where pansies have been planted year after year. Despite these challenges, pansies remain the only flowering annual that reliably survives the winter, making them the only real choice for winter seasonal color in our area.
We’ve developed a planting and maintenance program that helps reduce the impact of these diseases. While diseases are difficult to control, our program has proven effective in most situations. It includes supplementing each planting with fresh, sterile potting soil and disease-preventing organics each fall, followed by monthly fungicide treatments throughout the winter. This increases the cost of our pansy program, but it has become a standard practice. Without these steps, pansies often fail, as is commonly seen with other contractors.
Even with our comprehensive program, years of planting pansies can lead to soil that is too disease-ridden for supplemental potting soil and fungicide to be effective. As a result, we are finding that we eventually need to replace the potting soil entirely, likely every five years.
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