A month ago, I had to rescue my white violets. I thought they were just rootbound, and since I had put off repotting them for almost a year, and I was like "oh **** i should do that" after their leaves started going limp and their flowers wilted and didn't rebloom. But then it turned out they were actually sick, and it was serious. Like, something fatal with slim chances of recovery. They're currently my oldest plant aside from the peace lily that is technically my mom's. These violets are mine, and I already lost my (actual) oldest violet plant to what I assume was something very similar to this.
What I ended up doing was super risky, but if I did nothing the plant was going to die. No doubt about it. I was an idiot and I let this stem rot progress to a pretty severe stage. I followed a procedure for restemming violets--unrelated to the rot, African violets get longer stems as they age due to leaves being removed from the bottom and as they get new leaves, they accumulate some height. Some people periodically restem the violet because it can 1, start growing crooked, and 2, it can be sort of unsightly, I guess.
Following this, I had to actually decapitate the plant. Cut it right below its crown, removing all of its roots and most of its stem, leaving only tissue that had yet to show signs of rot. It was scary. And it was super stressful for me to go through with. So here I am with just the top of this plant that I had to trust to reroot. I actually went to a garden center to get a rooting hormone as a cushion to make me feel a little better about the whole thing. I dusted the cutting with that before placing it in fresh soil and a smaller pot. Then I had to put it in a bag. It needed to stay in a terrarium environment while it is to reroot and I had to leave it like that for a month.
Well, background aside, all of that was done on November 1st. I'm really excited to see that my violet looks pretty healthy considering all of that, and I can see rooting just above the soil. I get to remove it from the bag today and I'm really happy that it pulled through. I may post pictures later.
ha ha the last post i made in this thread was also about plants ha