African Violet Basic Care Page 4

Don Geiss' Babies to Adult Plants

BABIES TO ADULT PLANTS

Often the question is asked on the Internet, when do you remove the babies from the mother leaf? The answer is when the individual cluster of leaves indicate that they have formed a plant.

Having said that, let me elaborate a little so that the term individual cluster of leaves is more understandable. When the baby leaves begin to emerge from the soil they simply look like a hodgepodge of greenery. As they enlarge over a period of days and weeks the leaves begin to shape into better defined clusters.

When one picks up the pot and spreads the clusters it should begin to look like a number of tiny leaves are formed from a single stem. If it does not look that way it is too early to cut them apart because cutting into the mass may result in a gob of soil with more than one plant. In most cases some baby plants are cut through the middle because the individual plants have not yet been well defined.

It is hard to tell someone exactly when to divide the babies. We head south for the winter and put down anywhere from 150 to 250 leaves. When we return the watering pans where the 3 ounce solo cups were placed looks like a jungle. Masses of leaves form a complete cover over the pans.

(Just an aside explanation here------I believe we described our watering system in an earlier article but the reader may well ask what we mean by pans. They are made of galvanized metal and measure 30" long by 20" wide and two and one quarter deep. Over the top of the pans is fitted a piece of hardware cloth. This is a screening material much like chicken wire but with holes one half inch square. It is possible to buy hardware cloth that has holes one half inch wide and one inch long. The solo cups are set on this screening and the wick runs down through one of the holes into the fertilized water. If any of our readers are interested in this type of pan, a good source is the local tinsmaith or company that installs heating ducts. They have a machine that bends galvanized metal easily to form a box. They then seal the corners with solder.)

It is that pan that we described as being one mass of leaves. When we begin breaking apart the babies the clusters of plants covering each individual solo cup are removed from the cup. We carefully brush off the top layers of soil. Remember now that top soil is usually loose because the roots always head downward toward toward the water. Once that soil is brushed off, the individual clusters forming each plant should be obvious. If it is not we simply place the cluster back in the same container, spread on a little loose soil and place it back on the pan. We rarely have to do this because experience has taught us simply to look at a cup and tell whether it is ready to be separated.

A break off knife is used to cut out the individual plants. This is a knife available in hardware stores where tiny sections are serrated so that they may be broken off to provide a new sharp edge. Of course one may use any sharp knife or Exacto type knife to do the job. It is slid along the edge of the little stem and sliced through to the base of the roots. In many cases there are no roots that come with the stem. Irregardless of whether it has roots or not that plant is set in a three inch plastic pot. It really is about the same as setting leaves in the beginning except there is more that one leaf attached to the stem. For our purposes we plant every one of the little plantlets that are affixed to the mother leaf. Generally we get four to 12 plantlets per leaf. There are times that we would like to get more plantlets from a specific plant (Irish Flirt for instance). In that case we cut off the larger of the plantlets but repot in the same solo cup the leaf which may well have a few tiny plantlets attached to it. These eventually mature and the mother leaf is still productive enough to put out additional plantlets. When we come to the last baby in any cup we generally cut off the leaf at the top of the soil and plant whatever cluster of roots is left with that last plant. It sounds perhaps as though it is a rather haphazard way of doing things. As we became accustomed to conducting this operation it was easy to simply set the plantlets in place rapidly. If it had roots a narrow putty knife was used to open a hole in a three inch plastic pot full of damp soil. The hole was made by pushing aside the soil on all sides of the center of the pot. The hole was made large enough to accommodate the root ball if there was one. If a stem with leaves and no roots was all there was to be planted, a hole was made in the pot of soil with a pencil. In all cases the soil is lightly tamped around the stem.

The four ply acrylic yarn wick is always inserted in the pot before it is filled with soil. It runs up the side of the pot and sticks out the top. When the pot is filled with soil the part of the wick that sticks out above the top of the pot is bent down and then the soil is pushed over it. If it is allowed to stick out it dries at the top and then the wick continues to draw up water to replace the dried top. The water in the pan is then used up in too rapid fashion.

The plants are left in the three inch pots then until they flower and are sold. What few holdovers we may have are repotted in three and one half inch pots. We keep very close records on the individual cultivars and when one consistently does not sell well it is thrown out rather than being repotted. Our taste for a particular plant is often overruled by the wants of people to whom we sell plants.

To read more of Don Geiss' writing, and in particular about experimenting with these plants, please continue on to African Violet Care Page 5. Thank you!

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