Jessica's African Violet Expedition

My Grafting African Violets Experiment

*I am, by NO means, an expert at grafting!!  All of the information below is based

 on materials that I have read and through my own observations.*

Ok so I didn't come up with the idea of grafting African Violets myself.  My

husband came home with the idea after listening to some people at work discuss

grafting trees.  So I thought I'd give it a try.

Most everyone is familiar with grafted plants.  The most common ones we see are

in garden centers.  You know what I am talking about, those cacti with the pretty

balls of red, pink, and yellow on top are grafted cacti. 

When you graft a plant together you are trying to get the cells to join together

and grow as one.  Like in hybridizing you would get a mix of both plants traits.  I

tried grafting African Violet leaves and one young plant.

What I used for grafting my African Violet leaves together was tape and super

glue.  I used a sterile exacto-knife to cut the leaves and plants in half or in such a

way that they would touch the other cut half of the second leaf.  I tried different

grafting methods on the different leaf subjects.

Here are pictures of each of the leaves that I grafted together. 

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 This is Lilla Blåklockan and Tiny Dancer.

Unfortunately I didn't take a picture of how I put it together and I can't find the

notebook where I wrote it all down.  Sooo when I find my notebook I'll write how

I attached them together.  I am guessing that I did the side ways cut and stuck

them together with scotch tape.

This is the finished product.

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 This is Rob's Vanilla Pink and Golden Eye.

Here is how I attached them.  I cut the bottoms at an angle and used some scotch

 tape to make the ends meet.  Boy these tiny leaves were hard to work with! 

 This is the finished product.

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This is Alchemy Yellow Star and Green Go.

Here is how I attached them.  I cut the bottoms at an angle and super glued the

 ends together.

This is the finished product.

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 This is Taffeta Blue and Golden Autumn.

Here is how I attached them.  I cut the bottoms at an angle and super glued the

 ends together.

This is the finished product. 

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This is Asteroid and Midnight Blues Noid.

I cut each in half longways down the stem a taped them together.  I put a little

super glue in the middle to help keep it together.

This is the finished product.

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Here is my plant grafting experiment.   I am putting Cloudy Skies Noid together

with Bia.

I am cutting down the center of the plant leaving half of the roots for each plant. 

I tied the two halves of plants together with thread and I also used some super

 glue. 

This is the finished product. 

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 Here are all of my grafted leaves & the one plant

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So after doing all of that, I only lost 2 leaf cups!!  On the 2 that I lost the stems

rotted away.  I moved these 4 remaining grafting projects to a less humid

environment.

These is the remaining subjects in my experiment:

~Taffeta Blue/Golden Autumn~

I am seeing tons of mouse ears pop up on this one.  I really want to take it out and

see if the babies are coming from each individual leaf or if they are joined.  I

guess I will just be patient. What it is looking like is the babies are from each

individual leaf.  The Taffeta Blue leaves are darker and the Golden Autumn leaves

are lighter.  The babies look the same way.

                      You can see in this picture the darker                    and in this picture the lighter ones

                            babies are from Taffeta Blue                        on the left side are from Golden Autumn

~Alchemy Yellow Star/Green Go~ 

These guys are looking pretty good.  I see mouse ears so thats a good sign. 

 Hopefully these will be a cross of the two!  

~Tiny Dancer/Lilla Blaklockan~ 

These are cute still!  I have mouse ears and one of the sets doesn't look like

either parent leaf so maybe there's still hope for my experiment!!  I'll keep

watching to see what it ends up looking like when it gets bigger.

~Cloudy Skies Noid plant/NH Bia Plant~ 

These two are definitly not growing together!!  They are growing new crowns and look pretty good and are still living so I guess I'll let them grow out some more.

Check back later to see more updates!!!

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