Violas in pot on balcony railings 22nd November 2020 004

They look super.

Thank you, Lindak! :)

It's nice to have a bit of colour outside at this time of year.

Precisely why I like to grow Pansies & Violas on the balcony every winter! :)

For several years now I have lost a lot of my Pansies to an itsy bitsy grey white aphid which reproduces in such numbers that the green of the leaves becomes more grey white than green.

A couple of years ago the majority just collapsed where they were growing - they looked as if they were wilting from being too dry but they just came away in my hands. I dug out the rootballs thinking that perhaps something was eating the roots but found quite good root systems.

They hadn't rotted either from excessive water. They turned brown a few days after I noticed the wilting & I had to remove the majority, very few survived long enough to flower during the spring & even those few did poorly.

What I did notice however was that a huge number of Pansies planted by our town council had gone the same way as mine! In the gardens of our block of flats there is quite a big flowerbed. Many years it had been planted up with Pansies & they had mostly been fine. But the year my plants collapsed the majority of the Pansies in that bed also died. So it seemed to me that it really had been some sort of virus that had attacked them causing them to wilt, collapse & die.

That seems very odd Balcony. The only thing I've ever had in my pots that's killed any plants is vine weevil. Perhaps it was some sort of fungal thing, or they got too wet or too dry. It was a funny year weatherwise last year. I'll have a look on the internet and see if there was a problem.

There is lots of information on the internet, and most of the problems are fungal and weather related. One site said to thoroughly scrub pots before planting, but it could be a problem with weather conditions.

Thanks for looking that up but it happened a few years ago. May have been fungal, certainly not from being too damp. I removed carefully the rootballs on some of the dead plants & they seemed quite alright.

Whether we had a wetter than normal winter I don't remember. As I said it didn't just happen to mine but to 100s the council planted as well.