The experts on this forum will give you good advice, however, my two cents is that the plant needs at least 3 hours of darkness to trigger the bloom cycle. Otherwise, it will just keep making more green leaves and crowns.
Can you put it in a dark spot when you leave work?
Joanne

Here are the two crowns...

Thanks fortyseven! yea I could always just turn the light off.... Its a energy efficient building so all the lights turn off at night but I thought it needed more than 8 hours so I left it on all the time. I have 3 AVs the other two are still blooming but are a little farther from the light.

I have one plant that looks like that...like the leaves are standing almost vertical. It is located right next to other plants that have leaves that lay out flat. Is that reaching a way of avoiding light? or caused by some other trauma? It started doing that after I repotted it one time. Mary

It looks nice and healthy and, yes, that is another crown. You can repot it and and separate it there and have two plants.

Plants are not all alike in their light preferences and it can be a little difficult to decide what they like. Usually "reaching" means not enough light, but growing straight up can also mean "help! I'm trying to protect myself from all this light!" It takes awhile for them to flatten out and some never do readjust. Some varieties that like lower light are grown at the end of lighted shelves, toward the back, or maybe even on a shelf with higher lights or in natural light. Another variety will sit there and won't bloom until you move it to a "better" location. Blessedly, many of them aren't too particular.

Mary, I had a smallish one that was doing a carrot imitation and I weighed it down with a paper plate and it would kick it off after I went away. I moved it around on the window and patted it firmly every time I attended them. It's a little better now. Of course, some leaves aren't flexible enough to take this.

Right now, Optimara Pennsylvania has no buds. I don't know if this is a habit of the variety (to rest) or if I need to do something to it. It is another victim of the catattack now, BTW. Two reds and a blue so far with those mysterious bites.

Anyway, if you repot it, the small one might adjust better to less light than the large one. It just depends. Nice looking plant though!

Diana

Thanks Quimoi - I'm going to try potting it and putting it on the other side of my desk. I think all 3 of mine are different varieties but they all had the same tag on them at Lowes. (they were in the clearance rack for $1 - sad looking but came back to life quick) I have this other one that seems to be completely different. It flowers like a mad woman but seems to grow all these little "suckers"? its looks like a bad hair day... should i trim the crazy leaves away?

Try to remove the entire sucker in one piece. You can repot it in a mix of 60 per cent vermiculite and 40 per cent AV potting mix if it has no roots when you remove it. Or spring water. But wait until it finishes blooming. J

What my Lowe's have are Optimara plants but the last photo isn't one that I'm familiar with. Maybe someone else will recognize it or maybe your store carries other varieties It is beautiful. The first one looks a lot like Optimara foliage.

What you are showing is a sucker that has gotten quite large. If you repot and take that off, it will take your plant awhile to recover, but it will look nicer after it's all over. People do let them grow that way though... Again, you will have at least two plants there.

Some plants at my Lowe's have suckers (or extra crowns) on them and others don't. One kept getting tiny suckers around the base and I could remove them. One I just bought had one large enough to remove and pot up in a Solo cup.

It may just be luck of the draw because I bought what turned out to be Optimara Tennessee and it had no extra crowns, no suckers.

Diana

Your plant is growing tight and upright because it is getting too much light. It is trying to avoid all that light.

Plants must have a dark period-they use the dark period for the photosynthesis process. The dark period is just as important as the light period.

Try to emulate a plant's natural environment when you grow them. African violets are from Tanzania which is close to the equator. This area of the globe has almost equal day/night length. Your violet will do much better with 12 hours each of light and dark.

Linda

Lisa ...

Your initial picture looks like Optimara Rhapsodie Cora.

Is it a white/purple bicolor in bloom ???

I would shut your light off when you leave work. A plant needs some downtime to grow and bloom properly.

I'd also take the opportunity to split your crowns and repot all of your plants as single crowns. Just take a sharp knife and slice down through the soil and roots in between the (2) crowns. For large suckers, try and separate the suckers from the larger plant. Sometimes they can be just plucked off/out of the main plant.The act of separation, itself, may trigger some blooming.

Good Luck ...