It is hard to believe that Otterly Blooming started early 2025 with the planting of lisianthus seeds. The gardening, dreaming, doubting and planning started years earlier, but in early February, when I was one week postpartum with our 5th child, the plans started to become a reality with Lisianthus of all things!
Now lisianthus are famous for being a hard flower to start. I came to realize that wasn’t because they are particularly hard to plant or to get to germinate. What makes lisianthus so difficult to start from seed is the time required to keep them alive before they can get out to the garden. The “babysitting” time required leaves lots of room for negligence.
Here was our timeline for 2025 … make sure to see at the end what I would do differently next time!
February 7: Planted seeds in trays – four trays total.
February 16: Started to see them germinate!
February 28th: still tiny but have two sets of leaves forming
April 14th: Consolidated down to 3 trays from the original four. Plants are still small but getting more robust.
April 22nd: Began to harden off with all our other seeds.
May 10th: Planted out in the yard. Still so tiny! Also, by this time I had managed to kill about half of what I originally planted.
June 19th: Finally seeing growth!
July 10: Getting bigger!
July 29th: BUDS FORMING!!
August 14th: First blooms! Still not ready to cut though.
August 22nd: More blooms. A few are getting close!
August 26th: First bunch picked and sold!!!!
August 27: Apricot too. Aren’t they GORGEOUS!
August 30th: Heart eyes!
These babies are unreal! So gorgeous and their vase life is outstanding! I am talking weeks.
So from start of the baby seeds to the cutting of the first blooms was 200 days! Let me say that again… it took 200 days to get our first cut! That is an insane amount of time for me not to kill something!
In 2026 I have decided to buy plugs, but if i were to do this again what would I do differently?
- Start earlier! February 7th was a month too late at least to begin. I should have started in early January but pregnant me was not wanting to do anything.
- Use a fan during seed starting. We got some dampening off that could have been avoided with better circulation.
- Don’t forget to water the seed trays! Ooops. I blame postpartum brain.:)
- Plant outside a month earlier! I didn’t know last year that lisianthus can tolerate cool days so I didn’t need to wait until our last frost date to plant outside. With the help of some frost cloth, I could have planted out a month or more earlier.
- PLANT MORE! These babies are simply gorgeous. My sister told me how amazing they were but I could not comprehend how amazing until I tried them myself. The 200 days are totally worth it.
Just for reference I planted the following varieties from Johnny Seeds
- Arena III Gold – My absolute favorite!
- Arena III Apricot- a close second!
- Voyage 2 Champagne – I was underwhelmed by these but they were still stunning!
- Voyage 2 White – I managed to kill most of these.