After you repot your Av - it has some kind of damage to its roots - unless you mold potted it to the next size without touching the root ball. At that point the watering should be minimal - just to keep the root ball barely moist. Otherwise it will rot.

Make sure that the soil is NOT wet - put your pot on a stack of newspapers and let it sit to absorb excessive water.

Baggie is a very good idea.

No matter how experienced we are - repotting is a stress - and some times we lose AVs to rot.

After it sits in a baggie for a week or so - your bottom leaves will recover - or not. Usually removing of a bottom row of leaves is good - you get rid of old tired ones - and it stimulates the growth spurt.

Irina, thanks for the advice. The soil is barely wet. I just felt it this morning, and the top of the soil in the pot is pretty dry. I have been barely watering it since it was repotted. It has been in the baggie for at least a week, and the outer leaves have not recovered. The inner leaves as I said seem pretty good. I guess you do not think I should repot it again at this time.

Yolanda

Yolanda - just remove the droopy leaves and do not worry. Sometimes if you stick the removed leaves in water - they will revive - and you can use them for propagation - just in case. It is a good idea to put a leaf or 2 down for backup - especially it is a one you especially like.

I always take something off - even if it is a one that I move from a solo cup to a 3" pot. Baby leaves, yellowed leaves, The plant reacts to a small trauma with a production of a growth hormone. Even when I am not repoting but grooming. The rosette to be neat needs to have leaves increasing in size from the top to bottom - and when the plant is moving from juvenile to mature - happens that undersize leaves are on a bottom row. If you remove them gradually row at a time - a rosette gets less crowded and spreads out.

I just heard recently - that if you have a row of baby leaves in a middle of rosette - usually it happens if there is a break in culture - or sometimes without obvious reasons - they need to be removed as soon as possible even if it is in a middle of a rosette - whole row of 3 - because they are the ones that will be producing suckers. The rosette will look funny for a week, and then plant will reposition the leaves to be symmetrical.

Irina, thanks. I will probably remove the droopy leaves later today as part of the watering routine. I will try to revive them by putting them in water, maybe even the whole droopy leaf in water. I can try with one leaf to see how it goes.

Again, thanks Irina.

Yolanda

Wrap them in a paper towel and stick them in a glass with an inch of water on a bottom. This way you can keep them for a day or 2 to maximize the rehydration without drowning.

I,

Irina, I will do that now.

Thanks,

Yolanda

Irina has got this covered. I couldn't have given any better advice myself.

that's a nifty tip about drooping leaves - i get that sometimes after the repot when i remove too much of the soil on plants with very long necks.

usually i don't want to remove even more leaves, creating a fresh neck ;(...i just wait, sometimes it takes sev days.

usually at least some of them firm up. those that don't i remove after some time (a week or so) - i figured may be the plant can withdraw some nutes from them in the meantime.

irina's comment about the row of small leaves on established plant causing suckers later intrigued me. i have one AV that just won't give me suckers.

had it for 2 years now - may be if i kept it quite cool for a couple of months it would produce a sucker finally?

wouldn't that be nifty for a stubborn non-suckering chimera?

Drop it on the head - and oups - the center is dead - and the suckers are all over...

Not that I advise it 8-))

a-ha-ha! but i hate to remove the center! i want to keep the center going AND have a sucker or two. won't that be possible then?

It is possible to restart a crown, so maybe that would be a win win! :D

Easiest way is to remove the crown and root it and yes, that will then make suckers around the old stem as Irina said. That's the only sure way. But if you change the conditions the plant is in, and especially bump it to brighter light, that can also cause suckers. Not a guarantee but that is often the cause of suckers in minis.

If it is flowering you can also try bloom stalk propagation. Harder to do on those varieties that produce very tiny or nearly absent stem leaves, but pretty easy on those that have more obvious small leaves below the flowers. Yachiyo for example is easy for me to get babies from bloom stalks but Yukako is considerably more stubborn.

Also, if you are afraid of 'removing' the crown and rerooting it, you can just pinch out the growing tip of the crown instead. Then no crown to worry about rooting, almost nothing is removed from your mother plant to threaten it either, but without a growing tip it'll make the lateral shoots we call suckers.

well, i do get baby leaves, but never accompanying suckers.

i've been practicing something different for a few seasons.

when my room temps get warmer in may - i watch for mites. and if i manage to notice it early, i isolate the offender. remove NOT the center of the crown, but 3 leaves that are bunching near the crown leaving 2-3 tiny at the tip (sometimes they snap off too - but i'm pretty careful now).

and then i spray with neem - the crown tip is then exposed and hairy infected leaves are removed, so the spray gets everywhere easily.

repeat next day and then ev 2nd day 3-4 times. and then watch and may be spray a couple more times. mites GONE! but then it grows those pesky baby leaves that take sev months to grow out. so in effect this is like making a sucker, but much faster and there is only center growing - no offense to symmetry!

it's ugly, but hey, i don't have to throw it out either! somehow i lost the patience of waiting for leaves to root and sprout...

oh, the point here ;) - i never had suckers near the crown from this 'practice' :). and i've done it quite on a few plants.

when this happens on a big mature violet - once i remove big older leaves slowly - it becomes a juvie in 6 months.

All, thanks for your advice. Right now I have taken the baggie off the peaked violet. It did not seem to get more humidity, and the soil was dry. The crown is alive. I have taken some of the outer leaves off, and tried to freshen them up, and now planted them for propagation. Time will tell how they do.

Thanks,
Yolanda