Perennial horned violets can bring bold colors to the garden. But is it better to buy early plants or to sow horned violets yourself?
Horn violets (Viola cornuta) convince with their colorful flowers, which look at the viewer in a friendly way from April to October. If you want the plants to spread a good mood in your own garden, young plants can be bought or seeds can be sown. But which variant you choose does not only make a financial difference with horned violets. Below are tips for buying horned violets.
Buy Horned Violets
Horn violets can be bought as young plants or in the form of seeds in specialist shops. The young plants have been vegetatively propagated and therefore have a longer flowering period compared to plants grown from seed. Plants grown from seed impress with a particularly large number of flowers.
When can you buy horned violets?
Horn violets attract attention with their seemingly endless variations of flower colors. The varieties cover colors from purple to yellow to blue to almost black. You can buy young plants of these colorful miracles in spring from specialist shops, hardware stores, supermarkets or garden centers. The seeds are available all year round.
What should be considered when buying horned violets?
In general, make sure the plant looks he althy and strong. If you want to plant horned violets before mid-May, ask your specialist retailer whether the plants come from the greenhouse. If so, the young plants must be acclimatized before transplanting. After the plants are used to slightly colder temperatures, they can be planted out. Plants from the cold house can be planted out immediately after purchase. Our sustainable and peat-free Plantura organic potting soil is particularly suitable for planting out your horned violets. You can find out how to plant your horned violets here.
Note: In 2014, Greenpeace detected pesticides that are harmful to bees on horned violets from hardware stores and supermarkets. So, for the love of nature, invest in plants from specialist retailers.
Sowing Horned Violet Seeds
Horn violets love to be crossbred. If you don't keep enough distance between different varieties, mixing occurs very quickly. Those who want to grow true-to-variety plants are therefore better off using seeds from specialist retailers. If that doesn't bother you, you will be surprised by new color variants after sowing specially harvested seeds. But hybrids can not only develop between the varieties. Horned violets can be combined with garden pansies (Viola x wittrockiana), Viola stojanowii and wild horned violets (Viola cornuta ) are crossed. The greater the genetic content of wild horned violets, the longer they live. If the pansy genes predominate, the flowers are larger, but the plants are shorter-lived and less hardy. If you pay attention to a few things when harvesting the seeds, nothing stands in the way of your own breeding experiment.
Harvest horn violet seeds yourself
Anyone who harvests horned violet seeds themselves cannot say what awaits them the next year after sowing. Certainly, however, there will be one or the other special flower that is characterized by a new color or a new flower pattern. Creating new variants is easy. The capsule fruits form as soon as you refrain from cleaning out withered inflorescences. These contain about two dozen tiny, dark, round seeds. When the capsules are ripe, they burst open. Either the capsules are left on the plants and the ripe seeds fall to the ground, or the capsules that are still closed are harvested. When harvesting, proceed as follows:
- Harvest seed pods when they are light brown and closed
- Dry the capsules in a warm, airy place until they burst
- Collect Seeds
Sowing horned violets: timing and procedure
Violets germinate in the cold. They need a longer period of cold to germinate evenly and well. Self-harvested seeds should therefore be sown freshly after harvesting. The seeds can be grown outside. It works like this:
- Late summer: sowing the seeds
- Fill open seed tray with seed compost
- Sow seeds on soil, press only lightly (light germinates!)
- Location: shady and sheltered
- Keep evenly moist
- Keep dark until germination, then lighter
- Germination temperature: 15-18 °C
- Prick out in small pots when the first leaves appear
- May: planting out
Seeds available in retail stores are artificially cold-treated and can also be sown indoors in a seed tray with potting soil from January to March. The procedure is the same as when growing outdoors. The germination time is 8 days to 4 weeks. You can also sow horned violets directly in the bed until the end of September.
Note: There are varieties that can be propagated particularly well from seeds. The varieties 'Admiration' (dark blue), 'Blue Beauty' (bright blue), 'Blue Perfection' (light blue), 'Gustav Wermig' (violet), 'Perfecta Alba' (white) and 'Rubin' (dark wine red) can be quickly and just pull it.