Potting Mix:  I use Park's Grow Mix for everything. It's a peat based mix from Park Seed Company and it has a good deal of small wood bark in it as well as perlite and a bit of fertilizer added. When I repot, I don't need to feed the violets for about 4 weeks after repotting. On the rare occasion that I wick water a plant, I cut the Grow Mix in half with perlite.

Watering Method:  I bottom water for the most part, usually about once a week. I keep all my plants on cafeteria trays and flood the trays with fertilizer water, then empty out the excess in about an hour. Every month or so I top water with plain water (no fertilizer) and pour off the excess to leach out any fertilizer salts that might have built up in the potting medium. I repot about every 6 months so salt build-up is rarely a problem for me. My first choice for water is rain water but when it is not available (as in the winter and drought seasons), I use reverse osmosis water since my country well water is very hard and very alkaline.

Fertilizers: I use Peters 20-20-20, Peters African Violet Special, and Optimara fertilizer, alternating from one week to the next. I feel that alternating these three fertilizers give my violets a good balanced diet. I'm also of the philosophy that too little is better than too much and I rarely feed my plants more than 1/8 teaspoon per gallon of any brand of fertilizer. They bloom just fine.

Lighting Set-Up:  I use several of the windows in my house for growing violets and I have four very large stands of three shelves each with flourescent lights over each shelf. Two are in my basement and two are in a spare bedroom now called "The Violet Room". I also have a sun room which faces east and the violets share that space with about 120 orchids.

Temperatures: I do not have air conditioning so in the summer, my violet room may go up to 90 degrees during the day. During the hottest months, my upstairs plants frequently quit blooming until the temperature goes down again in the fall, while my basement plants bloom all summer long. My basement growing area can get down as low as 55 to 60 degrees in the winter. Many of my variegated plants live there where the cooler temperature promotes more variegation and more intense coloring in the blooms. I also use this cooler basement area to keep seedlings. Keeping them cooler slows their growth and since I only have room upstairs to bloom out 40-50 at a time, keeping the others in "suspended animation" allows me to deal with just a few at a time while I am making decisions about whether or not to keep them for further observation and possible registration. As I discard plants that don't measure up to my standards, I can bring others up from the basement to replace them. Once they are moved to a warmer growing area, they grow faster and bloom quite quickly.

Janet answers our questions on Page Four