Pansies

[Victoria]

I want to plant some pansies in a few flower planters, can I do that now?

[Petee]

Now is an excellent time.  Just toss a light plastic bag over them on freezing nights.  They are very cold hardy but they can still be damaged when it goes really low at night.

[lavender]

I don't know what your ground is like but mine is too wet to plant anything right now. The cold however will not bother them. I've had pansies blooming in January on a south facing, heavily mulched bank. Even snow doesn't do much to them.  A good hard freeze might make them look a little limp but they will pop right back. Plant them if you can dig your ground without making mud cakes.

If you do cover them (and I've never heard of anyone doing so)  please don't use plastic. Any of the old timers will tell you that frost comes right through plastic. That is why you used to see all of the blankets, old bedspreads and burlap sacks hanging from clothslines in the spring. I have a very large plastic greenhouse and if we get cold weather after the little plants go out I will either bring them in or toss old blankets and rugs over them. The plastic is not a good insulating material and, while it concentrates heat in the daytime, it does nothing to insulate at night.

[Victoria]

I wanted to plant in flower boxes, is that ok?

[lavender]

That should be OK. We aren't going to get the kind of weather that will actually freeze roots and it takes more than a bit of cold weather to freeze pansy roots. Plants that aren't in the ground are more susceptible to cold but plants in widow boxes have more protection than those out in the open.

[Cardinal Fan]

I learned the hard way about using plastic to cover plants. I covered all my plants last year when it was cold with garbage bags and the plastic just froze them. In fact it seemed to intensify the frost, I lost all of them. What kind of pansys grow well in this area? I know there are small ones and I've seen some pretty big ones too.

[lavender]

The small ones are violas and they are more likely to survive our winters  than the bigger pansies. I'm not sure what it is with pansies but, while the tops are very cold hardy, the plants themselves tend to not make it through the winter. I think it might be that they need very good drainage. The ones that I had for years and years were planted in mulch on top of plastic on a slope. Technically, they weren't even in soil. They kept reseeding themselves year after year until we tore the area up.

Most of the pansies are hybrids so when they reseed you don't get what you put in but they are pretty anyway. The "Ice Pansies" that come in in the fall are supposed to be hardier than the others. I just googled ice pansy to see if I could find a source for them and LOL, my article came up at the top of the list http://downtoearthgardenclub.org/articles/108-ice-pansies.htmllist. Kind of wondered why I got emails asking about them. There used to be a source on-line for ordering them but I can't find it anymore. Lowe's and Wal-mart both get them in in the fall.

If a pansy is happy where you have it growing, it will either make it through the winter or the seeds will grow in the spring. If it isn't happy its gone.

I tend to agree with you about the thin plastic. It almost seems to freeze the plants faster. Plastic buckets work well though. They hold in the warm air.

[Petee]

I've never had a problem with plastic although I have had them freeze in the spring if they weren't leftover from the fall before.