As the days get warmer/hotter, the pansies will be unable to cope. I have two patches, one looks awful. The other was munched severely by deer and have grown back. They look great with their fresh foliage and they are loaded with flowers and more buds.

One annual that can be planted a little later is annual vinca. It loves hot weather. Other need cooler temps to get a good start.

They will get leggy and eventually dry up and die. It's hard (I tried one year not to do it) but if you want color or something there, you probably have to do it before mid June. It hurts to pull them up while they still look good, but it's the only way. Notice that most of the professionally landscaped areas are being done now.

You can try the summer annuals or some coleus if there is some shade.

I too have a hard time pulling up my pansies when they still look healthy. This year though they seem to have gotten leggy awfully early. Maybe because of the 80-plus degree days we've had already. Sometimes I just take out some of them, the worst looking ones, and gradually do all of them. Makes me feel better!
Another thing to consider is that if you wait too long, you may have a hard time finding fresh-looking annuals for sale.

Those pansies are history unless we begin to go into another ice age. I hate it too, when my Johnny Jump Ups are looking so good right now and in a couple weeks they will all be dead. Time to think about what to swap them out with.

It's very difficult to rip them out but they are starting to look withered. I have vinca and wave petunias planted in between some of my pansies so when I do rip everything out, I'll have a head start on a few plants.

last year i did marigolds from seed in between. i put the seed in right after last frost, and the marigolds got big enough to crowd out the pansies right about the time the pansies started looking sad. ditto dwarf zinnia.

this year i ran out of time:)

I totally understand. My pansies finally look really good, after looking pretty scraggly all winter. I love the color combination with my Spiderwort, too. Now I'm trying to find some purple summer annuals that will give me the same color, and similar look. Does that even exist?!

I read somewhere about heat tolerant pansies. Anyone else heard about them?

HI again, Thanks for all the comments, you have convinced me to pull them out Saturday. I went and bought some annuals today, wow, not a very good selection out there already, so I can imagine how bad it would be if I waited longer (you can tell sales have been good the last few weeks at the big box stores!). I did get some some zinnias and lantana and I also got some things I never heard of before, like MOP ROSE (!?), well it was cheap and it's all sorts of color..we'll see what it does! Thanks again for all the comments on the pansies, you are the best! :)

(not sure if this will post on the original thread or a new one - the site would not let me reply again to the original thread as I alrady did) - Oh silly me, it's not 'mop rose'..after much searching I found it is 'moss rose' - or - portulaca (sure wish they had that name on it at the store, but now I know!)..and I'm excited..looks like it will do good as a border in our heat!

Same problem here. Everyone's pansies looks great. I planted marigold seeds in another section but didn't think to do it where the pansies are.

Moss roses do great in the heat. You will love them. I usually replace my pansines with moss roses but this year I am trying something different.

I am living in Atlanta zone 7. I ususally bought pansy plants from HD. I just got new born, so I need to save some money this year... So I want to grow pansy from seed.
Any advice?

1. Where I can buy the good pansy seed?
2. When should I start sowing?

Many thanks
Alpharetta

I tried it from seed I saved from my pansies one year and did get some flowers. I would start them in a window box and plant them when they get to the size you see in the nurseries. You should probably start now if you want them in for fall.

They sell the seed packets everywhere. I even saw some in publix. Last time I bought pansies, they were 99c or $1.99 a flat. It's not worth the aggravation in my opinion to have to grow by seed, keep seed moist, then transplant.

Pansies last longer down here in sw.corner of Ga. In order to keep window boxes looking lush, I have duplicate plastic troughs. Winter-spring, pansies. Summer-early fall, begonias. I start the next season crop in spare sets of troughs as soon as plants appear in nurseries and nurse them along until I am ready to replace current boxes. This saves me from having to throw out plants still blooming.

My pansies looked great until mid July then suddenly I looked at them and it was nothing but a thick patch of bermudagrass. I didn't remove them because I think they're a biennial.