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African violets 103 ~ What do I do with all the babies?

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barleychown:
Well, if you are anything like me, you have now started WAY too many leaves, and separated WAY too many babies from their mommy leaves, and have LOTS of babies growing. This is what I do with mine.

First, after they have been separated from their mom, and potted up, they go live in the nursery for a few months.

Here is my violet nursery:



It's two shelves in my laundry room, because I ran out of space in front of windows LONG ago.

Here's one pan full:



Happy little guys, right?

With the lid off:



And all separated out on a tray:

barleychown:
Now, because some of them are getting way too big to be living in pans in the nursery, I have separated them all, and am re-potting each.

Here are the first few:



Notice that I use different size pots, depending on the size of the root ball of each plant. It is VERY important not to pot them into a pot that is too large for them. The more loose soil, the better the chance of loosing your plant to root rot.

barleychown:
The ones that have graduated to the taller pots will go live on a pebble filled tray in front of a window.



The tray will be filled with water, and the pebbles will help hold the pots up out of the water. As the water evaporates, it will increase the humidity around the plants. This will help these babies with the stress of havinf been taken out of the covered pans, where the humidity is very high.

barleychown:
Some I pot up into nice pots as gifts. This one should settle into his new pot and be blooming for mother's day.



If you choose to use clay pots, be sure to soak the pots for several hours before potting into it, and make sure the pot and soil never dry out.

As for the ones that are still tiny, or in smaller, shorter pots, they will go back into a pan, and back to the nursery. By the time I make it through re-potting all the babies, which usually takes me a month or so, doing it in spare minutes here and there, the small ones will have grown, and it will be their time to move out. :grinnnn:

Any questions?

duh:
What do you do with them all?  That is a bunch of AV's.

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