My mom asked me to help her trim and repot her violets. Some are quite overgrown. I have no clue where to start with this one! It looks like there's several baby plants growing out of the main stem. I'm thinking I remove these and of course any damaged/yellowed bits…. But I'm scared of killing it!
by 13drakon777
1 Comment
Looks like you’ve got multiple crowns.
African violets are typically kept with a single crown, meaning roots grow up into a stalk, and from the center of the stalk, one ‘crown’ of leaves is allowed to grow. The leaves from that crown grow out radially from the center stalk.
So you’ll have layers of leaves, the lowest layer is the oldest, biggest leaves, above that is another layer of newer medium sized leaves, and above that is a layer of new small leaves.
What you’ve got is a big healthy AV with several pups, or offshoots from the main crown.
To clean it up, you should do the following:
1) Clean away obviously dead leaves.
2) Identify how many pups you have
3) Carefully remove the pups by breaking them off or cutting them off with a sharp knife.
4) Clean up the lower leaves remaining on the main crown. You want to make sure the crown is balanced, basically. Do not remove a lot in this step, just a few if needed. Don’t remove new leaves at the center of the crown, though.
Once you do this and have the plant cleaned up of these little pups, you can repot it, and it should grow as normal. I can’t see how tall the main stem is, really, but if it’s starting to get really tall, there’s another sort of issue we should talk about fixing.
As you’re working, you should also know that you can actually plant the pups you remove if you want. You can take a whole pup or a single leaf and if it’s strong it’ll grow new roots. Free new plants! You just need to plant it and ‘tent’ it for a bit, putting a clear plastic bag around it for a while to increase humidity.
In fact, if you are working on this AV and the whole stalk breaks, don’t panic. You can plant the whole thing, and it’ll grow new roots.