I bet they are about twice the size they were last year. If they have been blooming that well , then they must like your environment.

Don't pinch anymore middle leaves. My guess is that, yes you developed suckers and have more than one plant in the same pot. In the next couple of days you will get more help from this forum than you can shake a stick at(mom used to say that, I have no idea what it means) from some very experienced growers. In the mean time, look at previous threads in this forum. There is a wealth of knowlege here.

Thom

Klholtman

Please post your photos and we will be better able to help you. It does sound like suckers to me.
Cork

If you have more than one plant in the pot, you can separate them into their own pot. Please don't take out any middle leaves. If you want to remove leaves, take the older ones on the very bottom of plant. Check back on the older posts. You will find great information here on what to do with your plant.

African Violets grow as very well-defined rosettes on one short stem. (This is what is meant by rosette, from Wikipedia.)

In all african violets, there is a dormant growth bud at the base of every single leaf, and that bud that can grow into a second rosette. When the plant gets to a certain size, one or more of them will do just that. When an a additional rosette grows to be the same size as the main one, it will push the "parent" rosette to one side to form a single plant with 2 rosettes.

Picture a single rosette plant as a tostada, facing upwards.

A plant with two rosettes will be like two tacos pushed against each other. Where they meet, the leaves/taco shell does point straight up.

You can leave your african violets like that for a long time, if you want. It doesn't hurt them; they still share a root system and nutrients.

But if you really want to restore the symmetrical circular rosette, you can look underneath the leaves and see where the stems come together. You should also be able to figure out which is the main stem and which is the "branch."

You can take some skinny medical scissors or a very narrow knife and cut off the "branch," if you can clearly make out where it is. Make sure the one you cut is really the branch.

When you pull the branching rosette off and separate it from the first one, you will be able to see that it looks like a second african violet plant. You can set that in a bowl of water (facing upwards as much as possible) and it will grow roots - much quicker than a single leaf cutting grows roots - and then you can plant it.

On the original plant, there will probably be some bare stem at the base now; it will resemble a "trunk" underneath the rosette of leaves sort of like a palm tree.

To restore the original look, you can take that plant out of the pot, scrape some of the dirt off from the bottom of the roots (its ok if you disturb some of the roots), set the plant back in the pot, and put fresh dirt under the leaves on top of the roots.

It's tough get the dirt in and can end up breaking leaves, so it's best to let it dry out a bit and get somewhat wilty. A freshly-watered plant is very brittle.

African violets will continually produce branching rosettes if they get to a certain size. You can potentially end up with 2, 3, 4, etc rosettes on one plant.

If you leave them there, they will gradually get far enough apart that you will clearly be able to see the well-defined rosettes again - there will just be two instead of one - so when you lift, scrape and bury the plant like I described, you will have two pretty symmetrical african violets in a single pot.

Thank you to everyone for the incredible amount of information. I'm in awe at how knowledgeable everyone is and how willing you are to share your expertise with novice growers. It's very much appreciated. I'm pretty sure I'm dealing with "rosettes" that have grown into separate plants....Now I'll have to decide whether to divide them or leave them alone for awhile.
Karen