The delight of starting pink pansies indoors

I haven't started seeds indoors for several years, but this year I decided to renew the practice because I wanted pink pansies.

They are surprisingly hard to find. My local garden center, Mother Earth Gardens, has a really good variety of plants during the growing season, especially when it comes to Minnesota native plants, heirloom vegetables, and herbs. Plus loads of perennials and annuals. It's pretty amazing all the choices and variety they offer for a small urban garden center.

But, like other garden centers, they don't have pink pansies, except maybe in a six-pack of assorted colors, with one of them pink. But I wanted lots of pink ones, from light pink to mauve and burgundy. So I searched online until I found them at Swallowtail Garden Seeds.

The photo at left is  of the Heat Elite Pansy in pink shades, from their website, but you can't find these particular ones anymore. I assume they are sold out for this year.

I bought the seeds in January, along with some lettuce seeds (romaine and butterhead, my favorites), and paper daisies (Helipterum roseum), which are also mostly pink (as you may notice if you click the link).

I started the pansy seeds in late January and the paper daisies soon after, along with a few other flower seeds. The lettuce I'll sow directly in the garden very soon (ideally, I should have done it already—as soon as the soil became workable, which was a couple of weeks ago or so).

I used cardboard egg cartons as my seed-starting trays, which has worked very nicely. Pansies germinate in the dark, so I covered them with the egg carton lid until they poked their tiny green noses up, about a week after sowing. Then I uncovered them and kept them in a south window in a warm upstairs room.

My pansy seedlings in their egg-carton tray in mid-March, six weeks after starting.

But I didn't buy and set up supplemental lighting until March, which, in hindsight, I should have done much sooner. I had hoped they'd be forming flower buds by now, but they still have a ways to go, and I blame inadequate lighting for their slow progress.

I eventually potted them up to 4" diameter round pots, which was probably too big of a jump, so they languished some more after that, but now, on the first of May, they are showing real signs of progress in the porch, where they're getting sun from south and west windows.

The pansies are in the round pots farthest back. The square cardboard "pots" (boxes) hold marigolds at the center, and 3 tithonia at front. Photo taken on April 28 in the porch.

Even though the pansy seedlings haven't gotten as far along as I had hoped, I'm glad I started them from seed, along with the other flowers. It's very satisfying to nurture them along and eventually watch them flourish and bloom in the garden.

If the bunnies don't eat them.

Come to think of it, maybe I'll plant the pansies in the tall cast-iron urn on the front stoop.