Is it too early to plant pansies?
Hi! Brand new to the forum and quite new to gardening, so forgive me if this is an uneducated question.
I have researched but only found one opinion online, so I thought I'd ask here - quite simply, is it too early, in mid-August, to be planting up winter pansies? I see that the garden-ready trays are now available at the GC (at extortionate cost, I shall be getting twice the amount for half the price online obvs), but I gather that they may peak too soon, get leggy and fade away at the end of autumn if planted now.
It's just that my summer annuals (pots and hanging baskets of petunias, bacopa, alyssum and lobelia etc) are all looking faded and washed out, and flowering has slowed right down compared to how they were in June and July. I have cut back leggy plants, dead-headed religiously and even dosed them with liquid seaweed, to no avail.
I really want to empty out my 3 baskets and 4 containers containers and start again with pansies (cascadia), but am I bit premature?! I'm not expecting flowering all the way through winter, the rest of the summer and some of autumn would be perfectly acceptable!
TIA
Posts
Get them in, dead head and they will keep flowering, when they get leggy, chop them back, they'll grow out from the base, they usually go off flowering in the cold months but will start again in early spring.