After much patience (plus a little unabashed digging to see if the darn things were actually growing), I finally have baaaaby African violets! While I am a crazy plant person, I'm not one to generally call plants cute. However, seeing these tiny, perfect, fuzzy, bright green little leaves poke out of the soil? Is frickin adorable. It really is like seeing a baby plant be born, rather than a seed sprout.

A few things I've learned from this process:

1.) A light potting soil really is ideal. I really did lose patience a month or so ago and dig down the middle of the pot, just to see what was happening further down. Unsurprisingly, space is always at a premium in the window garden, and I was tired of using it up with a project that seemed to be going nowhere. I justified the dig (which was really just loosening the soil with my fingers) with my fears that the soil had settled and become too heavy for the new plants to force their way through. I think I may have been correct. The water had packed the soil solid, and these plants really are tiny to start with. At least that's what I tell myself.

2.) Along those same lines, it was probably a good month ago that I discovered tiny embryonic baby violets starting their long march to the surface. It was probably only two weeks ago that I could honestly say that they had broken through. This process moves sloooowlyyyyy. Consider that if the project had been going for two weeks when I wrote this post in early October, then I actually started the violets rooting in late September. I saw results in mid- to late December. This is not a project for impatient people. It may be that if you have the heated propagator mentioned in that post, the process will move faster. But it is also worth noting that it *can* be done without the propagator. Just not as quickly.

3.) Don't over water the leaves you're trying to sprout. My goal was to keep the soil damp but never wet, except for in the few minutes after it was watered. I even let it get dry to the touch a few times. This may not have helped speed the process along, but I had vivid memories of my mother's attempts at rooting African violet leaves in moist-to-wet vermiculite and in water. The bottoms of the stems would turn black and slimy, and when you tugged gently on the cuttings, they would slide right out of the vermiculite. My goal was to give them a chance to root before they started to rot, which to me, meant some moisture, but not much. About halfway through this process, I tugged on my leaves and they didn't budge. So I knew I had roots, way down in the bottom of the pot. I just needed to wait for the leaves to produce new plants. (And wait, and wait.)

Note: This post was written before the winter holidays as part of this survey post. It got so long I broke it out into a separate post, and then I was buried in the holiday avalanche and didn't get it finished. Since then, one of the other African violets has broken the surface, as you can see on the right. (Everybody say awwwwww.) I'm giving the third one some more time to produce a plant, but I'm not overly worried, as I already have two plants of that particular variety.