A few tips to promote the flowering of your pansy

With the smallest care, pansy, which grows in containers, blooms in colorful flowers before most plants begin to sprout. Use them to fill window frames and garden flowerpots, or plant them in flowerpots on porches or entrances. People usually grow tricolor pansy as annuals and biennials, but they are actually short-lived perennials growing in areas 6 to 10 of the USDA plant hard area.

Promote more flowers

Pick potted dead flowers and withered flowers once a week. Find its place under the flower and gently clip it off its stem with a pair of sterilized scissors or your fingernails. Flower removal is a practice called "dead head", which encourages more flowers by preventing plants from injecting energy into seed production.

Wash hands with soap and water to prevent plant diseases from spreading in your garden.

If you are using scissors, use a mild bleach to disinfect the blade. One serving of regular household bleach and three servings of water will suffice. Soak the blade for 5 minutes, let the solution kill the pathogen, then rinse the tool with clean water. Let the trimmer dry in a ventilated position.

Watering and fertilizing

When the 2.5 cm surface layer of the potted soil feels dry, water them. Pansy is best grown in moist soil and will wither if it is completely dry. Also avoid excessively wet, flooded soil, which suffocates the roots and is likely to cause pansy to sag.

Make sure there are holes in each flowerpot, container or window case to facilitate drainage.

Potted pansy needs bimonthly fertilizer to blossom well. Mix 1 teaspoon of general plant food concentrate, such as 12-4-8 formula, and fill it with 1 gallon of water. Every two weeks, the soil of pansy is watered with diluted fertilizer instead of tap water.

Management of leaf-eating pests

Check flowerpots, containers and window boxes for slugs and snails that feed on the delicate leaves and flowers of pansy. Take these pests off the plants and wipe them out. Slugs and snails usually appear in wet weather. So check it after it rains. If you see a hole in your pansy but can't find the culprit, check the plant with a flashlight after dark, because slugs often eat at night. With the exception of slugs and snails, pansy rarely has pest problems.

Understand the heat and summer burnout

Temperature has an effect on potted pansy. Violets thrive when the night temperature is between 4.4 ℃ and 18.3 ℃. They can tolerate daytime temperatures of up to 23.9 ℃. However, when the weather is hot, no amount of watering or shading can stop them from burning, withering and sagging. In areas with mild winters and hot summers, pansy can be grown from autumn to early spring. In areas with hot summers and cold winters, they thrive in spring and autumn.

In summer, when they begin to wither from the heat, replace them with more heat-resistant flowering plants to avoid withering.

Identification and management of leaf spot disease

Taking care of potted pansy sometimes needs to deal with leaf spots of pansy. The spots on the leaves are symptoms of fungal infection, are black or brown and may look greasy.

When buying plants, check whether they have leaf spots to avoid fungal infection to the plants. When you water your pansy, spray water on the soil to keep the leaves dry. Use new potted soil instead of recycling last year's soil when planting, and wash flowerpots with hot water and soap at the end of each growing season.

Throw away the tricolor pansy that has symptoms of fungal leaf spot and replace it with healthy plants.