African Violets and Gesneriads: Starting Chirita from leaves, 1 by lilypad22

lilypad22 wrote:
Ok, you are growing extra babies, I wouldn't mess with that leaf, as it is important, but you could try with another leaf to see what happens if you:

Cut that leaf in half. You know sometimes when you put down a violet leaf, you cut off half of it to put more energy into growing roots? Well, with a chirita leaf, if you cut the top half off, you can root that too and that top part gets 3 x the baby plants as the bottom end....you know, like the cut strep leaves produce lots of babies? Well at the chirita seminar the speaker said chirita will do the same...he got 15 baby plantlets from the cut leaf and about 3 from the bottom end.

I'm trying it to see what happens, just curious although I don't have anyone to give that many plants away to. In the leaves I have down in this picture, you can maybe see on the right side how I cut the top of the leaf off and planted both ends to root. I also tried this with four other leaves. I just did this, so if they grow ears, I'll try and post another picture. Sometimes chirita grow baby plants fast and other times slow, someone told me it was the time of year I put them down. tish