What grow medium did you use? What does it say on the bag? Does it make clear it's intended as a medium for containerized plants? Have you fertilized or added anything to the planting? When did you repot, and was it a full repot (bare-rooting, root-pruning, and a change of soil) or did you simply pot up a pot size and fill in around the perimeter of the root/soil mass with fresh medium? Did you move the plant to a new spot after the repot/ potting up?

Al

what he said...

plus.. did you premoisten the media before use ...

and does that pot have a drain hole ...

one way or the other.. its a water issue.. either too much.. or not enough .. plus the attendant transplant stress ...

fert is not a response to stress.. nor improper watering ...

ken

Hi All,

To try and capture all the above points:

• I used Organic African Violet Premium Potting Mix (https://www.espoma.com/product/african-violet-mix/)
• I did fertilize once repotted with MiracleGrow
• These were both repotted at the same time around ~1 month ago
• The plants stayed in the same spot as usual
• There is a drainage hole, but the soil definitely seems to stay soaked & drain slower than the previous (smaller) pots.
• I ordered coarse perlite to trace and add some space for drainage. Thoughts?

Thanks!

MG makes a lot of different fertilizers, so there's no way we could know how appropriate what you used was, or whether you used too much. It's doubtful the first application of an unsuitable fertilizer would cause a problem unless the symptoms are the result of over-fertilizing, which would cause the symptoms you're asking about, but any fertilizer or salt definitely would.

My best guess, based on what we know so far, is that you're over-watering/ watering too soon after the previous watering. If you're watering when the top inch of the grow medium feels dry, that's definitely over-watering. Unless you did a full repot with root pruning AND the entire root mass is confined to the top 2-3" of the soil, it really doesn't matter how dry the top inch or two of the medium is. What's important is how wet medium in the lower reaches (meant to mean BOTTOM) of the pot are. Most commercially prepared media based on peat, coir, compost, composted forest products, sand, topsoil ........ all fine textured ingredients, hold 3-6 " or more of water, making the bottom 3-6" of the grow medium, 100% saturated and nearly devoid of the oxygen critical to normal root function. If your pot is 8" deep and the top 2" of the medium feels dry, at least 5" of the medium at the bottom could be saturated. It's important to avoid this condition as too much water in the pot can rob your plants of nearly 100% of their potential for growth, which affects their vitality and appearance. The best way is to use a grow medium which is incapable of holding that much excess water. That's what I do and I can attest it makes growing things in containers an entirely different experience - less frustration and much more rewarding. Short of going the different grow medium route, you can start using a wooden tell to 'tell' you what moisture conditions are deep in the pot. See below for more.

If your pot is of manageable size/weight, the following 'trick' will rid your pot of ALL excess water and allow you to grow in media that would otherwise hold too much water:

Newton's First Law

For conventional container culture, it's a given that saturated/partially saturated media rob roots of the oxygen they need to function normally and efficiently. At best, soil saturation robs your plants of immense measure of potential in areas like growth, appearance, yields, ….. At worst, plants unable to cope with the strain of drought stress caused by saturated media will succumb to it. This isn't a 'scare tactic, it's a very simple and straightforward observation that will be difficult to disagree with a straight face.

Newton's First Law of Motion states that an object will remain either at rest, or in motion at a uniform rate and in a straight line unless acted upon by an external offsetting force. In this case, we will designate the 'object' as excess water in your potting medium. At risk of my being redundant, the 'law' can be seen as a simple statement about inertia, that objects will remain in motion and in a straight line unless a force acts to change the motion. To put the law to work for you/your plantings, you should water to beyond the point of total soil saturation - so the medium has been completely saturated and at least 15-20% of the water you have applied has exited the pot. Unless your soil is purposefully constructed to eliminate all/nearly all excess water, it's extremely probable, when the pot has stopped draining, there will be too much water in the potting medium for the plants' liking.

To eliminate this excess water: immediately after a thorough watering, hold the pot in one hand over the sink, lawn, or over-sleeping significant other and move it downward, then sharply reverse the direction to upward. You'll immediately note that a good measure of 'excess' water will “continue downward in a straight line” and exit the drain hole. The sharper the reversal of direction, the more water exits the drain hole. When you have repeated the exercise until water no longer exits the drain hole on the reversal of direction, you will have eliminated all excess water and your plants will regard you with a newfound sense of awe.

Using a 'tell'

Over-watering saps vitality and is one of the most common plant assassins, so learning to avoid it is worth the small effort. Plants make and store their own energy source – photosynthate - (sugar/glucose). Functioning roots need energy to drive their metabolic processes, and in order to get it, they use oxygen to burn (oxidize) their food. From this, we can see that terrestrial plants need plenty of air (oxygen) in the soil to drive root function. Many off-the-shelf soils hold too much water and not enough air to support the kind of root health most growers would like to see; and, a healthy root system is a prerequisite to a healthy plant.

Watering in small sips leads to avoid over-watering leads to a residual build-up of dissolved solids (salts) in the soil from tapwater and fertilizer solutions, which limits a plant's ability to absorb water – so watering in sips simply moves us to the other horn of a dilemma. It creates another problem that requires resolution. Better, would be to simply adopt a soil that drains well enough to allow watering to beyond the saturation point, so we're flushing the soil of accumulating dissolved solids whenever we water; this, w/o the plant being forced to pay a tax in the form of reduced vitality, due to prolong periods of soil saturation. Sometimes, though, that's not a course we can immediately steer, which makes controlling how often we water a very important factor.

In many cases, we can judge whether or not a planting needs watering by hefting the pot. This is especially true if the pot is made from light material, like plastic, but doesn't work (as) well when the pot is made from heavier material, like clay, or when the size/weight of the pot precludes grabbing it with one hand to judge its weight and gauge the need for water.

Fingers stuck an inch or two into the soil work ok for shallow pots, but not for deep pots. Deep pots might have 3 or more inches of soil that feels totally dry, while the lower several inches of the soil is 100% saturated. Obviously, the lack of oxygen in the root zone situation can wreak havoc with root health and cause the loss of a very notable measure of your plant's potential. Inexpensive watering meters don't even measure moisture levels, they measure electrical conductivity. Clean the tip and insert it into a cup of distilled water and witness the fact it reads 'DRY'.

One of the most reliable methods of checking a planting's need for water is using a 'tell'. You can use a bamboo skewer in a pinch, but a wooden dowel rod of about 5/16” (75-85mm) would work better. They usually come 48” (120cm) long and can usually be cut in half and serve as a pair. Sharpen all 4 ends in a pencil sharpener and slightly blunt the tip so it's about the diameter of the head on a straight pin. Push the wooden tell deep into the soil. Don't worry, it won't harm the root system. If the plant is quite root-bound, you might need to try several places until you find one where you can push it all the way to the pot's bottom. Leave it a few seconds, then withdraw it and inspect the tip for moisture. For most plantings, withhold water until the tell comes out dry or nearly so. If you see signs of wilting, adjust the interval between waterings so drought stress isn't a recurring issue.

Al

Thank you so much for the extremely detailed response. There is a good chance that I over-fertilized as I eyeballed the amount of MG going into the solution....In this case, I'll apply the water through and Newtons First Law :)

I will apply all of the above and try to get these babies back in action. Hate to see them struggle.

Keep you in the loop!

Mike

Please do. I'll be curious about what progress you make.

Al

You need to keep in mind, these plants are semi epiphytes. Most of their rots are naturally on tree trunks out in the open air. The other roots are in the leaf litter on the surface of the ground.

I wanted to hear your thoughts on the following:

Replant the plant into the same pot with the addition of some perlite into the mix and then water through (without MG fert) and shake out?

Thanks!

...... not sure who you're addressing, Mike.

Al

Sorry Al, was addressed to you :)

Do you mean you'll water over the sink, then move the pot up/down to rid it of excess water?

Al

Correct!

You're going to be surprised to learn that adding perlite to a water-retentive medium in the hope of increasing aeration is counter-productive ..... to a point. It actually decreases o/a aeration on a per volume basis. It sounds contrary to all you've read, and your intuition, but let's put our mind's eye to work.

You have a pint jar completely full of small particles and you can't get another particle in the jar. Let's also say the % of air space created by the fine particles is 25% of the o/a volume. We also have a bag of marbles. If we add a marble to the jar, what happens? The marble added displaces a volume of fine particles equal to to the volume of the marble and that exact volume of fine material spills out of the jar. The marble obviously has less air porosity than the volume of fine particles it displaced, so the o/a air porosity of the mixture of fine particles and marbles went down and any plant you might plant in the mix has less actual medium for roots to colonize. Add 100 marbles and you have horrendously low aeration and almost no medium that roots can colonize; and the medium they can colonize has exactly the same amount of aeration.

Or, visualize a jar of water full to the top. Start dropping marbles in the jar. The marbles displace water which overflows the jar. Before long, you can get no more marbles in the jar, but it is still completely full to the top with water. At this point, taking a volume of water equal to a single marble begins to increase the amount of air the jar can hold.

When someone adds perlite to Mr Muddy Mix, the muddy mix surrounds the perlite completely, so where does the aeration come from. When you start with a water retentive medium and your wish is to increase air porosity by adding perlite, air porosity continues to decrease until you've added so much coarse material there is no longer enough fine material to fill all the large pores between the coarse material. Only then will it increase. What you'll find if you wish to take advantage of what fast thorough drainage and exceptional aeration can offer is, your mix will end up being a VERY large fraction 75-90% of coarse materials like pine/fir bark or other mineral products well-suited as components of container media. See fig 2 @ this link for a visual.

1 of the 2 mixes that serve as my basic grow media.

What perlite does do is displace a fraction of the grow medium that would otherwise be filled with water after a thorough watering. In that capacity, it reduces o/a water retention, but it only serves that purpose when it occupies grow medium in a part of the pot that fills with perched water after a thorough watering.

"Replant the plant into the same pot with the addition of some perlite into the mix and then water through (without MG fert) and shake out?" Yes, that is a sound strategy. The little trick I described to remove water from pots of manageable size. As long as you can manage the pot, you can use grow media that would otherwise be borderline unusable or just plain too water-retentive to serve you/ your plants well. Once you get into the larger pots, it would be best to have a medium in play that works with you instead of in competition with you for control of your plant's vitality. I promise that's a hump you'll be glad to have put behind you.

Al