Columbine Flower Caring

Columbine flower caring, how? Don’t let columbine flowers dry out too much. Water when the soil is dry, and fertilize about once a month with liquid fertilizer. Regular fertilizing will help the plants produce their brightly colored blooms and grow thick foliage.

Another option is to add a time-release fertilizer in granulated form into the soil at planting time. Deadhead the flowers as they wilt throughout the summer and fall, if you aren’t planning to reseed more columbine flowers with the seedpods. This also will keep the flowers blooming longer.

If your columbine flowers are vigorous enough to overgrow their container or location by midsummer, you may want to prune them back a little for maintenance. Serious pruning of established columbine flowers, however, should be done in the early spring, when it encourages new growth. Don’t prune when the plant is still growing in the fall, as this will signal it to put on more growth, which will likely be damaged by frosts.

Divide columbine flowers every two or three years to help them stay strong, by digging them up, shaking off the soil, and gently pulling the roots apart to yield a new section of plants. Columbine flowers don’t last forever in one planting; you can expect three to five years of good blooms before starting again with new columbine flower seeds.

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Columbine Flower From Seeds

You may want to try growing columbine flower on your own from seed. It is a biennial plant that will not flower until its second year, however. Columbine Flower seeds must have a cold period of three to four weeks before germination will occur. Keep your seed packets in the refrigerator before sowing in the spring, or simply plant seeds in the fall and let nature take its course in the spring.

They should be planted in moist soil, and covered with a shallow sprinkling of soil. Then place them in a warm, sunny location until germination, which should take about 30 days. Columbine Flower seedlings can be transplanted outside after they develop their first pair of true leaves and are a few inches tall.

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