The Profane Gardener

Another cross finished growing out!

I only grew out six seedlings in this cross, because I didn’t expect anything that terribly exciting, but this cross surprised me – click though to find out what those six seedlings looked like: SVPW3 x KM Amadeus

Ever Glory

So, like many of you out there, I’m currently out of work, so I’ve been catching up on caring for my neglected collection. I’ve bee repotting, plucking out suckers, etc.

Blue Dragon

I’ve been dealing with a case of thrips too, and have had all my plants disbudded for over two months, spraying once a week. But I’ve got my fingers crossed that I’ve got them taken care of as…

Catching up on repotting

Spent most of the afternoon catching up on repotting my african violets. There were a few who needed it badly, and there are still a few who could really use it. But I got more than half of the leaf pots separated out and potted up in individual pots, and one of my containers of seedlings thinned out a bit and spread out. I have no idea how many seedlings I had in there – over a hundred, I know…

Update to seedling pages!

So My computer’s been borked for a while (try doing any amount of typing with a broken S key :P) so I’ve been a little quiet online. But the seedlings have been maturing, and while I’m a bit behind on potting them up, I got most of another two crosses grown out. Click the pics and it will take you to the pages for those crosses!

Rainbow’s Quiet Riot

A friend commented that all these African violet names sound like weed cultivars. She’s not wrong.

This seems like a fairly strog plant, standard, and with this pale purple on medium purple streaky fantasy. I’d love to see this type of fantasy on a coral red, with red and lighter red fantasy.

I wonder how fantasy is actually inherited though, whether each individual colour of fantasy is…

People often ask to see my setup where I grow my African violets, since I do have a fair number of them at this point. So here’s where the magic happens:

Two of the shelves are four foot racks from Costco, and the third is a three foot rack, also from Costco.

The lights are mostly T5’s, a single lamp to each shelf. Three of them are fixtures I got from a local club member and those ones…

Bloomlovers Orders have arrived

So, I made another order to Bloomlovers this spring, but after it arrived, a bunch of notifications came in that a ton of varieties I’d been wanting were back in stock. So I had to make another order, lol.

They’re all here now, and now I have eighteen leaves rooting for fifteen newly ordered varieties, plus the five or so leaf pots I got from the local club member who is moving.

There’s a…

So, I had some pretty deformed seedlings from this cross, but this one takes the cake. No petals, just extra pollen sacs. I only let it grow out this far out of curiosity. Garbage.

This is my favourite little one here. It’s tiny; definitely a miniature, about six inches across, and looks like it’s going to stay that size. The flowers are droppers, sadly, and there are only two to three blooms per stem. But the foliage is frickin’ flawless. This kind of foliage would win blue ribbons, I’m sure, and that’s whats earning this one a place in the breeding program to pass that…

ACA’s Coral Beauty

This one is a nice robust plant. It has some of that robustness I’m used to seeing in grocery store violets, so this will be a nice one to use to get strong hybrids that aren’t temperamental. Also grows in a nice rosette without any struggle.

The one thing I really dislike about this one is the way it holds it’s flowers. It’s difficult to get it to produce a nice crown of flowes because it has…

This one is one of my favourites, despite being a tad temperamental. It was my first named African violet, that I got at my first meeting at the local club. I’ve always loved the deep velvety red – I’d had no idea African violets even came in that colour at the time I first saw it.

I’d always planned to used it in my hybrids, so the first cross I grew out was a cross between this and S.…

More Interesting Things Turning Up In The SVGC Seedlings.

The second last of this cross had opened up it’s flowers, and I didn’t think much of it at first – thought I’d likely throw it away. But as more flowers opened I realized the white tips on some of the petals seemed to actually be getting more consistent, and then there was one flower with white tips on all the petals.

Could this be Dogwood tips?

I found conflicting sources on the…

For the last month I’ve been merrily pollinating one or two flowers every other day. Some of those crosses are clearly sporting seed pods already, and I’m up to something like thirty or so tags on stems with pollinated flowers.

And some people will be like, omg, you’re going to be overwhelmed with seedlings, Lindsay!

But here’s one good example of why I’m not that concerned. Not every…

Two more to be consigned to the trash. Nothing really wrong with them, other than they don’t have anything special going on, and I have to whittle down the seedlings at some point. I have one seedling with single flowers like this that I’ll use that has much nicer foliage to pass on to the next generation of seedlings, so I won’t bother with these ones.

I think I’ve decided on about four from…