One correspondent came up with the informa- 
tion that automatic water softeners employ salt 
and a compound called zeolite. Don’t know what 
zeolite is, but can understand that salt water 
wouldn’t be exactly the best thing for any plants, 
much less African Violets. 
So many of you have written about leaves. 
No, we don’t mail them, and Ill tell you why. 
Even with the most skillful, painstaking packing, 
it is very unusual for plants to result from mailed 
leaves. They take forever to root, for one thing, 
and more often than not succumb to rots before 
they ever materialize as plants. This statement 
is more or less true depending on the distance they 
are to travel. A customer in Memphis, 70 miles 
away, would realize more dollars and cents value 
from leaves bought from us than a collector in 
Duluth, nearly 800 miles away. If leaves are 
gathered one day and put down to root the next, 
the chances are fairly good. Beyond that, unless 
the packing is particularly good (better than we 
can do commercially and come out even on our 
books), African Violet leaves are better thrown in- 
to the waste basket. 
Another reason we don’t sell leaves is that 
we have to charge so much for them. It actually 
takes longer to pack a shipment of leaves than it 
does a shipment of plants. Postage one one leaf 
in a box to Memphis is about 15c; the labor to 
pack it runs about a dime; the box to put it in, 4c; 
sphagnum, tape, wax paper, about 2c; total, 3lc, 
not counting the cost of the leaf. Is a Blue Boy 
leaf worth 3lc? We don’t think so. 
By the way. We frequently get leaves and 
blossoms through the mail enclosed with letters 
which read: 
66 
oe 
. sent the leaf so you could tell 
what’s wrong with my plant’, or 
something along that line. Now 
the next time you do that, stick 
around the P. O. and see what 
happens. First, your letter with 
\| the leaf or flower in it is put 
>\{ through a machine which post- 
NS marks it. It squashes it flat. Nice 
me and flat. If you watch closely you 
can ‘probably see the juice squirting out of the 
leaf. If you wrote your letter in washable ink, 
it is now illegible. Next, your letter is sorted 
