African violets are quite simple to grow, I can assure you of that. Simply place a stem in moist soil, maintain plenty of humidity, and in eight weeks you will be rewarded by a profusion of young plants. How to successfully separate and pot the babies, as well as their appearance:
First, a little history. I cut off five leaves from various plants on November 27, 2012. I then filled a Boston lettuce tub with damp potting mix and added the leaves to it. The cuttings were kept in a nice humidity in the tub. In fact, the humidity was so high that I did not need to water the soil until the newborns appeared.
Each leaf had a number of progeny by February 13. On that day, I shared the picture seen above with the comment “Pass the smokes” on Facebook. I’m a father! You see, despite having propagated African violets for 40 years, I still get excited when new plants emerge.
I gave the infants a few more weeks to mature before I could handle them. It’s true that at this point, the mother leaves began to degenerate. However, the children continued to grow.
Use a spoon to dig beneath the dirt and pull out a mother leaf and her young. Alternately, you might carefully lift the cluster with your fingers while taking care not to severely damage the roots. (Some root manipulation is unavoidable.)
Don’t be mistaken
In my experience, there is never “only one baby clinging to a parent leaf.” Twins were born from the leaf up there. And if I had kept her in the soil for longer, she might have given birth to triplets, quintuplets, or perhaps octuplets. As a result, pay close attention to count the number of leaf rosettes that are visible. Every rosette is a whole plant.
Cut between the rosettes with scissors or a sharp knife—a pen knife works well—to separate them, as seen above.
For each young plant, use a pot with drainage holes. The diameter of the pot cannot be greater than 2 inches. Why? because too much soil would be held in a larger container. Root rot may result from an excess of moist soil surrounding a small root system.
Fill the pot with any moist, drainable material. Leaf mold and perlite mixed 50/50 will do, as will any commercial peat and perlite mix. No specific “African violet potting mix” is required.
Make careful to leave a 1/2-inch space between the mixture’s surface and the pot’s rim so that water can pass through.
Make a depression in the center of the pot with your finger to accommodate the roots.
As you can see, my propagation efforts resulted in 11 additional plants. These won’t require bigger pots until their leaf-span triples the pot’s diameter.
And there will be more children. However, they are too little to plant. I put the parent and kid in the top photo back in the terrarium of Boston lettuce.
If you provide ample light and humidity to African violet infants, you’ll discover that they grow considerably more quickly. In my writing room, my plants are kept on shelves with fluorescent lighting. I placed them in rudimentary terrariums to create a humid environment.
For example, I place several of my pots inside the covered rotisserie chicken container…
Others received cozy accommodations in a transparent, lidded plastic food storage container.
The plants won’t need water if they are kept in such sealed containers for at least a month.
They must, however, limit their time spent in the rain forest. Remove the lids for progressively greater periods of time each day after the first four weeks have passed. The plants can adjust to the amount of humidity your home provides in this way.
How soon will they bloom? In as short as 6–9 months, with the care I outlined in an earlier piece, you can anticipate consistent bloom.
Did this tutorial even just a little bit help you? Maybe you could tell me by posting a remark.
When ought my African violet to be divided?
Because of their lengthy lives, repotting these flowers is crucial. Ryan McEnaney, public relations and communications specialist for Bailey Nurseries, advises consumers to keep in mind that African violets can live for up to 50 years. To avoid becoming overly root-bound, plants can be repotted into larger pots as they mature. It’s probably time to relocate your African violet when it has doubled or quadrupled the size of your container and the leaves are beginning to wilt, according to McEnaney.
However, you don’t have to repot your plants right away. If your African violet appears to have outgrown its container, don’t rush to relocate it, advises Brian Parker, senior merchant for Live Goods at Home Depot. “African violets are best when their roots are in a little bound condition,” he adds. “They will produce and perform for years and years with just a simple routine of the right light and food,” the speaker said.
Do African violets produce offspring?
What exactly are young African violets? Pups, commonly referred to as suckers, are little plants that sprout from the mother plant’s base. Not a leaf or the crown, but the plant’s main stem is where a pup develops. An adult African violet may have a single pup or numerous.
Suckers can rob the mother plant of nutrients and energy, which reduces flowering and shortens the plant’s lifespan. Removing suckers is an excellent approach to propagate a new plant while simultaneously maintaining the health of the mother plant.
How should an African violet cutting be taken?
The most common technique of propagating African violets is via leaf cuttings since it is both simple and effective. This project should be completed in the spring. Take a healthy leaf and its stem from the plant’s base using a sterilized knife or pair of scissors. Reduce the stem to roughly 1-1.5 inches in length (2.5-3.8 cm.).
Consider dipping the stem’s tip into some rooting hormone. Put the cutting in a hole dug in potting soil that is one inch (2.5 cm) deep. Water the area surrounding it thoroughly with lukewarm water while pressing the soil firmly.
By covering the pot with a plastic bag and fastening it with a rubber band, you can give your cutting a little greenhouse atmosphere. Just be sure to occasionally let the cutting have some fresh air. Keep the soil in the pot just moist and place it somewhere sunny.
Usually, roots start to grow after 3 to 4 weeks. In 6 to 8 weeks, new, little plants typically develop leaves. At the base of the cutting, many plants ought to sprout. Carefully pluck or chop away the young, little plants to separate them. You will receive a brand-new plant from each of them.
Can two African violets be planted together?
I have a beautiful decorative pot that I would want to place three small violets into. The pot includes drainage holes and is around 10 wide. Is this possible?
both yes and no. The violets can be placed in the same pot as long as they are otherwise taken care of appropriately. Watering should be done with caution because these violets will be grossly overpotted. Even while three miniature violets’ leaves could readily fill a container with 10 gallons of surface area, their root systems couldn’t. The amount of soil in this pot is significantly greater than the sum of the soil volumes in the three minis’ individual pots. Additionally, keep in mind that violets develop best when they are not forced to compete for space and are not crowded together. Plants must compete with one another for light, water, and nutrients when they are packed together, which can prevent leaves from growing fully or correctly.
If you still want to combine three violets into one pot, we advise keeping each one separate first before adding it to the larger container. Given that the individual plants’ root systems would remain in their appropriate size pots, at the very least, this will lessen the chance of overwatering. Additionally, doing so would make it simple for you to switch out one plant for another in the future, ensuring that the arrangement always looks its best. If you decide to plant a violet in the large container, using a trailing variety would probably be the best option. Trailing kinds can more easily fill a container with such a huge diameter because they are spreading plants by nature. However, they still develop thin root systems, thus the depth of the container can be a problem. Fill the bottom of the container with very porous, well-draining material, such as perlite, if it is deeper than a few inches. This size container would be filled the fastest and most easily by a standard-size trailing variety, which is also the easiest to produce. Although it would take much longer, micro and semiminiature trailers would also expand to fit the container.
Do African violets grow in number?
By only sticking one of a plant’s leaves into some soil, some plants can be multiplied. These so-called leaf cuttings need to develop roots and branches in order to produce new plants.
If the bottom end of a jade leaf is placed in soil that is occasionally watered, it will sprout roots easily. Such cuttings can occasionally remain dormant, producing new roots but no branches. New shoots are certain to appear by bringing a small piece of the old stem along with the leaf cutting.
Rex begonias and African violets both grow quickly from leaf cuttings. To multiply either of these plants, use the entire leaf or even a portion of it.
Always have your pot of soil ready before you remove the cutting since a disconnected begonia or African violet leaf wilts quickly. And instead of using actual soil, root the cuttings in a sterilized, porous, moisture-retaining mixture. Ideal materials include moist peat moss, pure sand, perlite, or a 1-to-1 mixture of both of these.
African violets and begonias can be multiplied using a variety of leaf cuttings. Take the stalk of an African violet leaf and cut it off. A new plant will grow at the base of the stalk once you insert the stalk into the rooting medium.
A lot of new plants will grow along the cut edge if you cut off the far half of an African violet or begonia leaf and add the cut end of the detached half to the mixture.
Alternately, lightly score a leaf’s veins on the underside before laying it flat on the rooting medium. A new plant will emerge at each cut if you place a few pebbles on the leaf to keep it pressed up against the mixture.
Or you can make tiny, triangular pieces from a single leaf, each with a big vein. Each triangle that is planted upright and partially in the soil will sprout additional shoots.
Why is the growth of my African violet tilting?
- The neck of an African violet resembles a long, slender tree trunk. It might look a little like a tree.
- The trunk extends upward from the soil’s surface to the plant’s leaves.
- Three pictures of an African violet neck are provided below:
- These necks have a small size (1-2 inches).
- African violets may grow a long, thick neck (5 to 6 inches long) if they are neglected.
- The weight of the crown causes this type of neck to eventually slant to one side. A “goose neck” is the name for this type of neck.
- A neck can also resemble the trunk of a palm or coconut tree.
- These photos show the scaly surface of an African violet’s neck up close:
- African violets develop their crowns and show off their rosette-forming leaves from the top of the plant.
- The lower, older leaves begin to lose their usefulness and begin to die back as the plant expends its energy on producing new leaves from the top/center.
- These mature leaves are lost by the plant when they turn dry, withered, or yellow.
- In order to encourage growth toward the top/center of the African Violet plant, it is then required to continuously removing these lower leaves.
- A bare stem or neck gradually develops on the African violet plant as more and more lower leaves are lost or removed over time.
- The neck of the African violet plant pulls the plant away from the earth and the pot as it grows.
- At this point, the Violet needs to be repotted and the neck needs to be buried or covered with dirt.
- I occasionally remove 1-2 rings of leaves off the plant when the lower ring of leaves turns old, tough, yellow, brown, or mushy.
- As shown below, this leaves behind little leaf stalks.
- The neck of the African Violet plant can be seen after these stalks are cut away.
- The lower ring of leaves from African Violet plants are seen in the pictures below.
- The aesthetics are one justification for covering the neck. Due to its inability to keep its flat rosette shape, the African Violet plant will appear unsightly.
- The African Violet plant will eventually begin to grow at an angle and develop a neck.
- If the neck is left exposed to the outdoors, the plant will be more vulnerable to ailments like root rot.
- Three illustrations that demonstrate how to repot African Violet plants with a neck are given below:
Figure 1:
- The lowest leaves of this plant no longer resemble a rosette and are beginning to show signs of injury, aging, and yellowing.
- I started by removing a few of the damaged, aging, and yellowing leaves.
- This exposed the African Violet plant’s neck, which was covered with dry roots and brown scabs all the way around.
- I then took the plant out of the pot along with its mound of roots.
- I took out a few more dangling leaves to keep the rosette shape.
- I removed the brown scabs and dry tissue from the violet’s neck in order to promote new root growth there.
- Use a sucker plucker tool, a sharp knife, or a clean fingernail to accomplish this.
- The exposed tissue on the neck after scraping it appears bright green.
- Since the neck of my African violet plant hasn’t grown very long, I just scraped off a layer of soil from the base of the root mass that’s the same length as the neck.
- My neck measured around 1 when I took about 1 of soil from the base of the root mass.
- I re-potted the plant after adding some fresh perlite to the bottom of the container.
- Fresh soil was then added to the pot, covering the African Violet plant’s neck and root system.
- Now that its neck is submerged, it will grow new roots into the ground.
- Although I have never done this, you can sprinkle rooting hormone on the neck to hasten the process.
- To enhance humidity and encourage root growth, I simply place the newly planted neck in a Ziploc bag or humidity dome.
Cases 2 and 3
- I started by removing two sets of leaves (6–9) that were brown, yellowish, dead, damaged, or old.
- I next fully cut the teeny leaf stems off of the plant’s primary stem.
- Now prepared for the following phase, the plant. Use a clean fingernail or a sharp knife to carefully scrape the “trunk” or “bare stem” or “neck of the plant stem all the way around and down the length to reveal the inner green tissue layer of the stem.
- New root growth is encouraged by the exposure of this tissue layer along the neck/stem.
- I scraped the neck lightly with my fingernail.
- I simply took out half of the dirt from the mass’s bottom because both of these plants had short necks.
- I also took a small amount of perlite out of the soil mass here.
- Place the plant and root mass back into the pot at this point.
- Since there was enough soil already on the plant and the plant was the perfect height in the pot, I did not add any additional soil to the bottom of the container.
- The plant’s bottom leaves should barely touch or brush the pot’s rim.
- You can take more soil out of the bottom of the root mass if the leaves are too high.
- Place the plant and root mass in the pot after adding more dirt to the bottom if the leaves are sitting too deep in it.