Twenty-four pansies and violas rode home on the Forester's passenger seat yesterday afternoon, wedged in so they couldn't tip. This morning there was a thin fur of frost along the top of the porch rail when I carried them up the steps, and they didn't so much as droop. Their leaves were stiff with cold. By eleven the sun had worked its way around to our side of the house, and they looked exactly as they had at the garden center.
Why pansies in April
Pansies and violas are about the only flowers I can buy in mid-April and leave outside without fretting. Light frost and nights in the upper 20s don't faze them. They bloom hardest in cool weather, and by the end of June, when the porch turns into an oven, they get leggy and quit, which is right about when the summer annuals go in. They fill the gap between the last snow and the first petunia.
And they're up on the rail. Last April the deer ate all 30 tulips along our front walk in a single night, and I haven't forgotten it. This spring the daffodils I planted in November are blooming along that same walk, 52 of the 60 bulbs, and not one has been touched. Deer leave daffodils alone, which is the only reason they're there. The window boxes sit on the porch railing, and so far no deer has climbed our front steps for a pansy. I'm not assuming that lasts forever.
Two boxes for about $20
We have two white window boxes on the rail, each 36 inches long. I bought four six-packs, two of pansies and two of violas, at $4.99 each. That's $19.96 for 24 plants, twelve per box, and it's the whole flower budget for April.
I plan the boxes the way I'd plan a small painting: two main colors and one accent. This year it's a near-black purple pansy and a clear lemon-yellow viola, with a few white-faced violas with purple whiskers to break it up. The dark pansies look like velvet when the late sun comes in sideways across the porch, and the yellow keeps the boxes from reading as a dark hole from the street.
The winter evergreens and the last of the fall kale came out of the boxes in March, the kale brown and collapsed. I scooped out the top few inches of old soil, topped them up with fresh Pro-Mix and scratched in a small handful of Garden-tone per box. Then two staggered rows of six, about six inches apart, with the front row tipped slightly forward so it spills over the edge as it fills in. A slow drink from the galvanized can, and that was it. The whole job took less time than the drive to buy them.
The porch roof keeps more rain off the boxes than you'd think, so I check them with a finger every other day. Watering the porch pots is Mateo's job for allowance, and pansies are forgiving about his schedule.
The cold weeks, and what comes after
Mother's Day is my frost date for tomatoes, as a rule of thumb. It isn't a frost date for pansies, because they don't have one. They'll ride out whatever late April and early May throw at us, and they're happiest in exactly the gray, 50-degree days that make the rest of us miserable.
I pinch off spent flowers every few days so they keep making new ones. The faded ones go into a paper cup for my Tuesday after-school garden club, where second and third graders press them flat between paper towels inside the heaviest dictionary in the art room. Pansies and violas press beautifully. In two weeks they'll be bookmarks.
There's one more bit of porch math to do before June. Kevin starts repairing the rotted southwest corner of the porch on June 1, and the window box closest to that column will have to come off the rail and sit on the front steps for four days. By then the pansies will be getting tired anyway, so it's good timing for once.
What I did differently this year
Two springs ago I bought pansies the first week they appeared, in March, and left them in their plastic packs on the back steps for three weeks while I waited for a free Saturday. Half of them were stretched and yellowing by the time they went in. This year I bought them Friday after school and planted them Saturday morning. That's the whole lesson, and it took me six springs to learn it.
