If you missed it, read the first article in this series here: Propagating African Violet Chimeras Part 1.
So more about slicing and de-crowning of African Violet chimeras. This is useful to know how to do even if you don't particularly want to reproduce your African violet chimeras. Should your chimeric plant begin to destabilize and loose it's chimeric traits and revert back to a regular African violet, knowing how to de-crown or slice will help you to able to not loose your variety.
Here is an example of Rob's Lucky Charm, a miniature leaf chimera, that is showing signs of a destabilizing crown. It also got knocked over and lost a few leaves on one side. Leaves in or near the center where the new growth comes from are getting rather dark. Occasional odd leaves splashed with dark are fine and make for an extra lovely plant. But when the new growth is starting to show non-chimera aspects, your chimera may be in trouble. You need to get rid of that area that is not desirable! So we de-crown the center top of the plant. Make sure you sterilize your knife blade first with isopropyl alcohol to keep from spreading viruses, or introducing mold, fungus, or bacteria into your plant material.
To do that, simply take your craft knife and slice the stem right underneath the top of the plant. Here I got a little more angled than I wanted but that's fine. Everything below the slice is still good, showing regular and desirable chimeric leaf pattern. Some of what is on the crown is iffy or unwanted, but some of those leaves also look fine. If you look closely, this plant is also suckering around the crown with new baby plants - but there is nothing wrong with their chimeric leaves that are properly marked.
Here is a close up of that crown after I sliced off the 'good' leaves with a bit of stem attaching them together. If we look closely we can see that there are a few dark leaves on the lower side and right, but the suckers and the actual apex are nice light green with creamy white edges. So instead of throwing this crown away as no good, I'm going to cut out the couple of dark leaves and pot it up and bag it. It should root and grow into another lovely plant just fine /and/ keep growing those suckers which I will remove at a later date when they are a bit larger. If I'm wrong and it turns into a dud then it won't take the rest of the plant with it.
So what's next? Next we slice up the lower stem a bit more into thin slivers that each have a few leaves attached.
Here you can see where I have sliced several more sections off of the lower and upper pieces until I have groups of two or more leaves connected by central plant stem. There is one single leaf by itself to the left of the plant. That one doesn't have any dormant axillary bud attached to the bottom of the leaf's petiole - so throw that one away! Leaves without stem tissue attached at the base of the petiole will not come true to the parent plant with chimeras. The lower portion stem portion that has roots will be potted up to produce more suckers to remove at a later time.
Here is a close up of the 'wheels' of leaves still attached by the slices of central stem. All the rest of these leaves we now slice apart into singles, pairs, or maybe even a trio. Make /sure/ each one has a bit of stem attached to the leaf's petiole because the dormant axil bud tissue is tucked into the base where the petiole meets the stem. If you make the slices through the stem too thin, you might even slice through the dormant buds so we try not to do that.
Once you get your individual leaves ready, or pairs, or trios (any will do) then you are ready to pot them up like regular leaves you'd propagate for normal African violets. You can put one per pot or several, it doesn't matter. Seal them up into a baggie and put them under good light. In one or two months you will start seeing leaf babies coming up. This is where using leaf chimeras is helpful because I can tell either right away, or within a few weeks as the leaves take on their adult coloring, which babies are coming true to the chimera parent. Any that grow up as suckers from the dormant axillary buds usually come true to the chimera parent. But if any regular 'leaf' babies also appear they will be readily apparent with their darker solid green leaves and can be removed. I usually get very, very few duds that aren't chimeric but you will get some.
I have also potted up the bottom row of leaves still attached to the original plant with the roots. From a single little chimera like this I can easily produce 20 or more new plants within a few months.
This is a trio of such leaves potted up. Plant them shallowly or it may take a while for the babies to start showing. Below the photo is one of the leaf trios from the same plant about 3 weeks later. Sucker babies are already coming up! The deeper you plant them the longer it will take for babies to appear.
This technique can be used on non-leaf chimeric plants as well. The only problem with using it on an African violet chimera that has regular green leaves is that you won't know which plants came true to the parent and will bloom correctly or not - until they are grown enough to flower. Even then a young chimera plant may not bloom true right off. So keep it and let it mature and get large enough to bloom again before you decide to keep or chuck it - so you will need space to grow them out!
How reliable this method will turn out to be, just like working with bloom stalk propagation, depends on the individual variety. Any chimera that /usually/ comes true from suckers will generally come true from this method as well. Axillary buds generally activate and take over being the primary new growth before forming entirely new plantlets from scratch without bud tissue - but it can happen. In my personal experience I have about a 90% success rate with this method.
Here is the Rob's Lucky Charm base with new suckers coming up. The new leaves may look all green or all white and then start to show the chimeric pattern quickly. But if they STAY all green or all white on a leaf chimera, then you know the suckers are no good and should be discarded.
Before you know it you'll be overrun with little 'leaf pots' of baby chimeras begging to be separated and grown on into flower! Have fun with it. Experiment! Keep notes on your ratios of success so you'll know which methods are best for which cultivars because every variety of African violet is different.
That was fun, right? Let's review and do it all AGAIN with another mini leaf chimera! This one is Rob's Lucky Number! Here's one freshly debagged and removed from the pot.
We use alcohol on our knife before we make the first slice to de-crown it just as we did before. There is nothing wrong with this chimera destabilizing. I'm just slicing up to make lots more baby plants.
Then we are ready to start slicing the main stem into thin slivers with a few leaves each just like before. Most people stop right there and pot up the crown and use the base for suckering. You can too, or you can keep going!
Then we go back and recut the central stems so each leaf, or pair of leaves, or trio have a dormant axil bud and some stem tissue and not just cut at the petiole.
Here is a trio at one layer of slice that would be awkward to pot up so I divide to pot like regular leaves. If the leaves fanned out from the stem only on one side, it would be very easy to plant the trio still linked together by the stem if you prefer to do that.
Now we are ready to pot up our leaves with their dormant axillary buds! Seal it into a baggie and put it under lights just like a regular African Violet leaf pot. These dormant axil buds are the exact same buds that activate and become suckers if they were still attached to the parent plant. In fact if your plant is already suckering, but the sucker babies are too small for you to handle with confidence, slicing them like this and keeping the parent leaf attached is a great way to grow out those suckers while you restart your parent plant.
Here's the exact same three chimeric leaves 3 weeks later with sucker babies coming up where the axil buds are located - where the petiole meets the stem. You can see right away that the tiny new leaves are white rimmed and showing the chimeric traits. If in doubt just let them grow larger and it will be easier to see.
This ugly stump with the roots attached and a few leaves gets potted back up. Now it can form suckers around the central stem. I let this dry out slightly before bagging. If too wet it will all rot.
I do the same with the crown by making a tiny dent in the soil and pressing the cut stem gently into it. So cute!
And slip the crown into a baggie to form a high humidity mini greenhouse and put it under lights to root up. You could also dome these but I find domes are less stable, less reliable than bagging. Also, every time you open the dome to add water that escapes, or move things around, you risk shock and contamination of the more fragile plants and cuttings. Sealed in baggies you do not need to open them again for several months.
So that's it! Now you know my chimera African violet propagation secrets. I don't claim to have originated any of these techniques myself, just sharing what I have learned and use myself. Try this on chimeras with pinwheel flowers and green leaves just the same way. Happy slicing and growing! If you missed it, read more in Propagating African Violet Chimeras Part 1.
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