Beginner Gardening: The Mystery of the Flowering Pansy, 1 by ipc

ipc wrote:
So a few weeks ago Mrs. IPC decided she wanted a Venus Flytrap. The local home center garden depts didn\'t have anything quite so exotic at the moment, so we took a ride out to a nearby nursery to see if they might.

Of course they didn\'t (although quite a while later I came by some seeds, but that\'s another story).

What they DID have was this ginormous potted Pansy with purple, red and yellow flowers COVERING the thing. Mrs. IPC had to have it, so we became the proud, adoptive parents of a truly beautiful plant. We were well equipped with with instructions to water daily and then once a week feed it with some sort of green potion. They also cautioned us to pluck the dead flowers so that fresh flowers would pop up.

Well, after a couple weeks, our flowerless Pansy was looking pretty scraggly with MOUNDS of leaves and stems in some areas and a little thin in others. My good friend Google showed me how to cut the flowers off BELOW the seed pod and said it should bounce back in a week. Well we did a little Pansyscaping too, because the once symmetrical runway model was looking a lot like a green pillsbury dough boy. Sadly, this was at the top of a week long 100F heat wave.

Still, a week or so after normal weather returned, the little scrapper is looking much better. Nothing like when she came home, but nice enough.

The purple flowers are coming in. Not so much the yellow and red. If you peer in past the leaves there are a good number of wilted leaves in deep.

So we\'re still doing something wrong, but not sure what.

The before and after pictures are most likely fairly obvious...

Any suggestions for a couple of well intentioned but off-green thumbed folks?