My house is southeast facing. We get direct sunlight from sunrise until about 2-3 pm. I picked flowers that said they needed direct sunlight: pansies, geraniums, and petunias. I prepared the flower bed as follows:
-Cut down an old bush, removed roots (the ones I could get…)
-Dug up weeds and saturated the ground with Round Up (about a month ago).
-Tilled the soil and mixed it with a few bags of top soil (about 2 weeks ago).
-Sprinkled Miracle Grow pellets all over the soil, tilled again, and watered (hadn’t rained in a while).
-Last weekend, I planted my flowers & I’ve been watering every day that it hasn’t rained so the soil would stay moist, but not soaking wet.
-Mulched yesterday with a dark brown hardwood mulch.
Now, the geraniums are beautiful. Most of the petunias have hot pink flowers on them. The pansies, however, are quite pitiful. I got them for {content}.22/per six pack at Lowe’s (clearance). I thought I’d be able to bring them back to live. They have perked up a little– they’re not shriveled up anymore, and there is more green foliage on them. But they haven’t bloomed and they’re still small. How long do you think it will be before they perk up? The weather has been a bit unreliable. Two days ago, it barely hit 50 degrees F and today it’s supposed to hit 90!
Even if they stay small and pitiful, they’ll look better than all the neighbors’ weedy, unmulched, overgrown disastrous yards lol.
Edit: I shouldn’t say I "saturated" the ground with Roundup. I gave a light-medium mist evenly distributed over the whole garden. I intentionally did it a month in advance so the chemicals would have washed away by the time I planted my flowers. The bottle says it won’t kill flowers anyway.
We live in central Virginia.
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