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After a long, wet winter and the severe cold in January, pansies have shown little color until as of late. With improving weather, most are finally coming into bloom. What a welcome sight as pansy bloom in spring along with cherries and other early blooming trees and shrub ushers out winter and welcomes spring.
Pansies are very cold hardy but they can suffer here due to the constant wet conditions during normal winters when they do fall victim to diseases. The disease is most prominent in poorly draining and shady beds and where pansies have been planted for years. Despite this problem, pansies are the only flowering annual that survives the winter they are the only real choice for winter seasonal color in our area.
We have developed a planting and maintenance program that reduces the impact of the disease. These diseases are difficult to control but our program has been effective in most situations. Our program includes supplementing each planting with fresh sterile potting soil and disease preventing organics each fall at planting and following that with monthly fungicide treatments through the winter. This increases the cost of our pansy program but has become a standard practice as without these steps, the pansies will likely fail like they do with most other contractors.
Even with our comprehensive program, after years of pansies, the soil becomes to disease ridden that supplemental potting soil is not enough. Due to this, we are finding that eventually we need to replace the potting soil and will likely do this every 5 years.
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