Once upon a time I was an African violet addict, said so in m profile description. I got the taste from watching others posting African violet photos. At that time I had none and one pot of lower was at 3 - 4 euro. Lucky me, I have learnt how to "survive" and make the most of every situation, which translated into common gardening language, or African violet growing vocabulary means I've learnt how to propagate them.
So instead of buying a pot of flowers, I went to the nursery or the supermarket and collected some leaves that were already broken and grown my own flowers for free. Getting flowers from potting a single leaf takes time, about one year I believe, but the journey of watching the little leaf grow into a family is a lot of fun.
At some point I had five or six colors, a lot of pots and lack of space forced me to find a solution and a home to those flowers as after some time the new ones needed to be repotted. So I started selling them and to my surprise, the demand was high and I made some money. Then there was no demand at all 馃槀
Long story short, due to my carelessness, I was left with a lot of light purple violets like the one you see above, one pink and one red-ish that you're going to see below.
This is what I call pink princess, even though I don't like pink at all.
This is red-ish, or I don't know what shade of red or purple or ... I'll let you decide.
My African violet collection looks like this at the moment. The plan is to find good homes to these purple ones and by that reduce the existing number of post.
However, yesterday while in the supermarket, I spotted two pots of African violets, one purple like mine, the other was burgundy. The burgundy was very tempting, so I went closer and looked around for fallen leaves as where there are flowers, there are fallen leaves as well, due to mishandling.
I found one broken leaf, what you see on the left. The other is my work, I'm guilty of that as I lifted that from the pot. The two laves are not the same, that is visible. Look at the stems, one is purple, the other is like latte.
Yesterday I put them both in waster but my favorite way of growing routes is in the pot, not in water, so today there was time to pot them.
This is all you have to do, put them both in soil, up to their neck, add some water but not much as it's only one leaf, that can't take up much water and water it when the soil gets dry. In a few months new leaves will grow out and if I'm lucky, I can get some flowers in 2024. It's a long time I know but you don't have to watch the water boil, jut leave it be and mother nature will do the rest.
Those leaves would have been thrown away anyway, so why not give them a second chance, a new life. This is basically recycling 馃槒
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