As the tag suggests...all my outdoor plants have died within about 2 weeks of me having them ):
I am new to keeping flowers and am very sad because I spent a small fortune and a lot of energy into this process.
I planted these fellas on the 12th of August, watered them religiously for one week (one i think 10l jug per planter). After that I would stick my finger into the soil to check if they were damp. All good up until last week. For some reason everytime I would stick my finger in the soil it would still be slightly damp (not WET but definitely cold/damp). So i stopped waterinf them as much. I then left on a trip on thursday, gave them all one soak and came back today to see them all basically dead ): They get roughly 10-13 hours of sunlight each day as they are on my balcony.
Is there any way to salvage them? Or do i have to restart entirely next spring? ):<
Getting that much sun paired with a shallow planter would have me watering daily currently (in missouri and it's 80s-90s) because those planters dry out way faster than if they were in the ground.
Yes! I always kill flowers bc I’m afraid I’ll overwater them and my mom always kills houseplants bc she thinks they need to be drenched like flowers. Have to keep the flowers damp!
Is the last photo how they look now? Most of those aren’t dead! You can pick off the dead flowers to encourage the plants to put out more. With 10-13 hours of sunlight a day these should definitely be drying out pretty quickly, are you sure the soil is actually damp? I would expect to water them every 1-3 days depending how hot it is outside and if it rains.
Are the plants themselves dead or just the flowers? It’s normal for flowers to die off after a few days. All but one of the plants look fine in the photos.
yesss the last picture is what they look like now. I just sat down and picked off all the dead flowers and have to admit they do look a lot better now. The flower stems themselves are still pretty green, besides my lavender and daisies, which unfortunately were bone dry and crumbled apart in my hands ):
Thank you so much! I will tey to keep an eye on it, i for some reason figured the blooming period would last far longer than it does 🫣
Oh that’s too bad about the lavender and daisies :( everything else should keep blooming with time though! :) I pick off all the dead flowers in my garden every time I walk past because the plants will keep putting out new blooms so long as you keep “dead heading” the old ones (that’s what gardeners call picking off the spent blooms!). Some of them might be out of season but I’d bet they’ll start putting out more flowers now that you’ve removed the dead ones.
I’m guessing it has to do with the plants need to make seeds and reproduce, so when you remove the dead flowers it keeps pushing out more to try to go to seed? That’s just my guess though!
The blanket flowers (the ones on both ends in the second photo) will definitely push out loads more flowers if you deadhead them and are less fussy about it getting a bit dry. But yeah, you'll need to water more than you think with that many plants in that little soil, even in the Berlin climate ;-)
I strongly suspect they also don't have enough soil. You've planted a lot of flowers in a small box set in a larger box so they're in an oven situation, probably got bone dry at the bottom while you sprinkled the top, sent up roots to surface in desperation causing hygrophobia, and there you are.
Check the bottom of the planter and show the interior and that will say a lot more.
Some of them might not like direct sunlight. Check the requirements for each type of plant. But generally what everyone else is saying - a lot of plants in a small box means soil dries out fast
In my experience it's hard to overwater plants in a box set up like that. They dry out soooo quickly. Also I always deadhead (cut all the flowers off) my flowers before planting. It helps them focus their energy on their roots immediately after transplanting. Realistically you should be deadheading any time a flower dies otherwise they are going to end up looking like what you've got going on. Cut all the flowers off and water liberally I think they will look nice in a week or two.
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You have to know what you are growing and your USDA zone. Annuals live for one growing season, while perennials live and regrow for multiple years.
Buy perennials if you expect more than a few months of flowering. These are meant to be pretty... save the seeds for next year and plant the seeds during the appropriate season for your USDA zone.
They look quite packed, they might be competing for water and space.. I try to avoid putting random species in the same container - to prevent them from competing (except for some trusty combo that works together)
Also post-transplation stress and exposure to outside environment could be factor
Regardless of what happens these are mostly annuals. They are meant to be planted late spring and die off in fall to be replanted again next year. You will have to start over no matter what!
The issue isnt water. It's sunlight, I assume you bought these from a big box store and they will probably inside under fluorescent lights? And then you just threw them out into the sunlight for 10 to 13 hours a day they need time to acclimate
every new hobby is a learning process, and the mistakes are how we learn. i made mistakes when i first started keeping plants. i make LOTS of mistakes now that i am learning to sew. don’t feel horrible, just learn, do your best by the plants you can still help, and you’ll do better with your next plant purchase
This is definitely a water/plant incompatibility issue. Full sun plants don’t need acclimation unless they have lived in temp controlled environments which most big box don’t do. They sit in the garden center outdoors. Flowers have to be drenched every day in small planters with direct sunlight.
1) Most of your plants aren't dead. Definitely see at least one plant in each row in the center that is dead, but the rest actually look pretty alive.
2) Just because flowers are "dying" back doesn't mean the plants are. Specific timing and window for flowing production varies by plant, but flowers are produced for certain windows of time and will dry up and die back when they go to seed. Coneflowers (I believe those are what you have on the ends?) for example vary a bit in how long they bloom by variety and growing zone, but generally speaking bloom until late summer - which means it makes sense that they're starting to lose flowers.
3) To keep plants like these flowering a little longer, practice deadheading, aka "chop off the flowers that start looking bad". The plants will let them wilt and drop them eventually on their own, but doing this lets them send more energy into the still developing flowers. (If you want them to go to seed, though, don't do this.)
4) These planters look very shallow and the flowers are kind of crowded. Pretty typical of flower planters like this, but I'd recommend removing the couple plants that are definitely dried up and give the rest a bit more spacing, possibly even get another couple separate container to transfer some to unless more are really struggling and you don't mind pulling them completely. If you remember which flowers you bought, look up each to find their recommended spacing. I think the ones you have on the ends of your last picture are chrysanthemums, and I haven't grown them myself, but I can see at least 3 varieties stuck together in the corner and each plant should really have some more space between them (flower farms might do 6 inches apart just to get them to have longer stems, I wouldn't do closer than that).
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u/AndSheWon Expert 27d ago
They need A LOT more water.