The day will come, in midsummer, when you find your plants becoming ``leggy,'' running to tall-growing foliage at the expense of blossoms. Try pegging down each separate branch to the earth, using a bobby pin to hold it there. Pick the flowers, keep the soil dampened, and each of the pegged-down branches will take root and become a little plant and go on blooming for the rest of the season. As soon as an experimental tug assures you that roots have taken over, cut it off from the mother plant.

A second and also good practice is to shear off the tops, leaving an inch high stub with just a leaf or two on each branch. These cut-down plants will bud and blossom in record time and will behave just as they did in early spring. I like to shear half my plants at a time, leaving one half of them to blossom while the second half is getting started on its new round of blooming.

Probably no one needs to tell you that the way to stop all bloom is to let the blossoms go to seed. Nature's aim, different from ours, is to provide for the coming generation. That done, her work is accomplished and she ignores the plant.

Here is a word of advice when you go shopping for your pansy seeds. Go to a reputable grower, preferably a pansy specialist. It is no harder to raise big, healthy, blooming plants than weak, sickly little things; in fact it is easier. But you will never get better flowers than the seed you grow.