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My grandmother grew African violets for 40 years and never once repotted them, so who is right about root bound plants?
Last month I was helping my mom clean out my late grandmother's house in Toledo and we found her violet collection still alive in the same cracked clay pots she bought back in 1983. Roots were busting out the drainage holes, the soil was hard as a brick, and every single plant was blooming. I have always been told to repot every year or the plant gives up. My local nursery guy in Sylvania swears root bound plants just stop growing and slowly die. But here is this woman who did the exact opposite for four decades and her windowsill looked like a flower show. So which is it? Do violets actually like being cramped, or did she just get lucky with some kind of old school dirt mix? Curious what the growers on here do with theirs.
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joseph93223d ago
The cracked clay pots probably did more than anyone is giving them credit for. Unglazed clay breathes, so those roots busting out the holes were still getting air and the pot was pulling extra water out of that brick-hard soil all those years. People kill violets way more often by overpotting than by letting them get tight, since a big pot of wet soil around small roots is basically a rot factory. Your grandma's setup was a self-correcting system: small pot, air flow, and a plant that got watered on her schedule instead of some nursery rule. The yearly repot advice is really meant for plants in plastic pots with peat mix that goes sour, not for a 40 year old plant in clay that found its own balance.
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