Done, I tell you. DONE! And African violets, at no extra charge

Well, there. The Aran cardigan that seemed like an endless knitting project, consuming my life for a month and a half, is finished. Completely finished. With buttons, even. And my label inside.

So there. I'm now knitting quick projects, winter hats for Hearts for Warmth. According to their page on Ravelry, they are collecting handknitted hats, mittens, and sweaters for The Home for Little Wanderers in central Maine, so this is a project especially close to my heart.

I'll attempt to knit some mittens for the project as well, despite my feeling that the mittens I knit are a disappointment. Maybe I'll discover a new, fool-proof pattern for mittens.

Second topic du jour, completely unrelated to the first: How to grow African violets.

I'm not an expert on the topic, but I play one here in my own home.

For years I had sickly African violets which would sometimes bloom but, more often, just sit and look morose most of the time.

Things got so bad that their leaves even started to grow extremely pale. (The pale pink one at the left is supposed to have white/green mottled leaves. It's not sick!)

I was baffled. I was about to throw the violets into the compost bucket and pretend I'd never known them.

Then I thought: How about giving them some fertilizer? I hadn't done this for months, if not years. The poor plants were starving for nutrition. I have no idea why I'd come to assume they could exist on water alone. Their soil was depleted of nutrients.

I started giving them some liquid African violet food, and immediately I saw renewed hope in my violets. Their leaves slowly returned to a healthy, shiny deep green.

But the battle was not completely won.

How to get them to bloom regularly, almost non-stop, year 'round? Was this too much to ask?

Somewhere I read the suggestion that violets be watered ONLY from the bottom up. I had been taking mine to the kitchen sink every week or two, spraying them mercilessly with water, and putting them back at the window. I switched to putting a little African violet fertilizer in each of four small "tubs," such as an empty margarine tub, adding water, and setting the plant pots into the tubs.
It takes a few hours for each plant to absorb water up to the top of the soil. Sometimes I have to refill the tubs if the plants were especially thirsty. When the top of the soil feels moist to the touch, I know they're no longer thirsty.

Si

My final trick is this: I never put them in a window with direct sun. In fact, mine sit at north-facing windows year-round. They seem to like that amount of light, judging from their willingness to bloom almost non-stop.

I try to remember to spray mist them each day during the winter, but that's it.

My violets are much happier now, don't you think?