Like many of us who can’t say no to more indoor foliage, you’re seduced by the lush green houseplants at the nursery. You buy several, get them home, and dote on them like an adoring plant parent.
But over time, despite your best efforts, you anxiously watch the slow decline from perfect green houseplant into crunchy brown compost.
What’s the deal? You did your research. You read the websites. You followed the Instagram houseplant pages. Yet here you are, over and over, dealing with dead or dying plants that look nothing like the picture-perfect ones online.
It’s infuriating that you just can’t get your plants to stay healthy. Or alive.
Afraid you’ll be labeled a plant serial killer, you’ve decided to hit up Ikea for some fake plants and call it a day.
Hold up!
There’s something you should know before you completely quit: what you think is a “black thumb” might not have anything to do with your plant parenting skills. In fact, the reason your indoor plants aren’t thriving might not be your fault at all!
There’s a lot of bad advice circulated online around houseplant care. Most of it’s anecdotal: the blogger heard from a friend, who heard from a friend, who read somewhere that this is the exact right way to water/fertilize/care for a plant. Then they post their gorgeous houseplant pictures and we think: aha! If I do exactly that, my plants will look like that, too!
But they don’t. Then our plants die. And we feel sad.
If you feel like you’re doing everything right but have nothing to show for your hard work, I have good news. There’s an easier way to grow your indoor jungle!
Bad Advice: Plants Can Grow Without Sunlight
Sure…if you want to starve your plants. Nope, I’m not talking about fertilizing. Plant food is actually the simplest thing you can give them: light!
Plants are light eaters. That’s how they get energy to grow. If you aren’t providing natural light for your plant, it will slowly starve to death.
Even so-called low light plants need at least occasional sunlight to survive. Some plants can exist for years on low to no light, but that doesn’t mean they’re healthy (or happy).
What To Do Instead:
When a plant says it can take low light, what that actually means is it doesn’t have to be directly in front of a window and it doesn’t require direct sunlight.
But it doesn’t mean the plant will be happy across the room from a window or caving in a dark hallway. When a plant can see the sky, it’s getting natural light. If it can’t see the sky, it isn’t. Let your plants see the sky.
If you have seriously low light, grow ZZ plant (Zamioculcas zamiifolia), snake plant (Dracaena trifasciata), pothos (Epipremnum aureum), or heart-leaf philodendron (Philodendron scandens oxycardium or P. cordatum). And if you want a plant that needs more light than you have, use a grow light.
Bad Advice: Just Add Rocks
Indoor plants are grown and sold in green or black grower’s pots with multiple drainage holes at the bottom.
When you purchase a new houseplant, you may be tempted to immediately go home and repot your new friend into something prettier without holes. This move will save your furniture and floors, but whenever you water your plant the water will sit in the bottom of the pot and stagnate. Eventually this water will rot the roots and your plant will die.
A popular solution is to add a layer of gravel or pebbles to the bottom of the pot, then plant as normal. Sometimes people will place landscape fabric or a coffee filter on top of the stones to keep soil from filtering through.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t help with drainage or prevent stagnation. It just decreases the amount of soil the plant has to grow in. And it ends up leaving a gross, filmy, mucky mess in the bottom of the pot.
What To Do Instead:
Keep the plant in the plastic grower’s pot and set it in a prettier container, called a cachepot, that doesn’t have drainage. Dump out the excess water about 10–15 minutes after giving your plant a drink.
Or repot it into an attractive ceramic pot that does have drainage. If you’re worried about furniture or floors getting wet, use plant saucers or old plates to set beneath the pot.
Bad Advice: Watering Cures All
This suggestion crops up a lot in online houseplant forums.
Leaves droopy? Water it!
Not flowering? Water it!
Plant not growing? Water it!
All this watering leads to…well, overwatering. This is so easy to do when you’re a beginner plant parent. Hell, it’s easy to do even when you’re an experienced plant parent!
Many of us love our plants so much that we want to do our absolute best for them. Sometimes that love looks like watering them more than they need. Humans are weird.
In reality, watering will not cure all indoor plant ills. Most indoor plants must dry out between waterings or else the soil stays too wet and the roots begin to rot. Signs of overwatering include failure to grow, wilting leaves, soggy soil, and mushy brown roots.
What To Do Instead:
A common suggestion is to water on a schedule. Keep in mind, though, that indoor environmental factors change throughout the year and can throw off a watering schedule. Ambient humidity, seasonal changes in light intensity, and temperature fluctuations are just a few that affect how quickly a pot’s soil will dry out.
The best way to water is to learn the signs of thirst for your particular plant. Some plants, like pothos, peace lily, and philodendron, get noticeably droopy leaves when they’re dry. Other plants, like many ferns, turn a lighter green.
If you’re uncomfortable letting leaves droop, learn how heavy a pot feels when wet versus when dry. Finally, use a tried-and-true method: stick your finger down into the soil and see how it feels. Don’t worry: you’re washable!
Bad Advice: Any Water Is Good Water
Some of us under-water, in which we aren’t watering a plant often enough. But did you know you can water a plant regularly, even fairly often, and still under-water? I know — it seems unlikely, yet it happens!
You can water a plant quite often and still not give it enough to survive. In this case you aren’t watering the plant thoroughly.
I had a corn plant (Dracaena) where, every morning, I’d dump the water leftover from my nightstand glass. I thought I was watering the corn plant often enough.
What I was actually doing was only watering the top half inch or so, if that, while the roots deeper in the pot were staying dry. Over time that corn plant stopped growing, existing leaves wilted and their edges browned, and it began dropping older leaves. All are telltale signs of under-watering.
What To Do Instead:
Water thoroughly and deeply. When you water your plants, fill the pot to the rim with water, let it drain through, and repeat.
If soil has gotten too dry and pulls away from the edge of the pot, the water will likely run through very quickly without soaking to the roots. Allow the pot to sit in water for a while to saturate the soil, then dump out the excess water.
Bad Advice: If You’re Comfy, Your Plant’s Comfy
Some plants are tropicals. Some are desert dwellers. Others are native to areas with distinct hot and cold seasons.
For some plants our easy, consistent, temperate indoor climate is paradise. For others, it feels like we’ve condemned them to a desert planet: they need humidity. Our indoor heating and cooling systems suck moisture out of the air.
Low humidity doesn’t always kill plants, but humidity loving varieties of some ferns, orchids, begonias, and others will bite it if they don’t get the ambient moisture they need. And low humidity will make other species, like prayer plant, look crispy and crunchy.
Despite our best intentions, the humidity in a plant’s native environment is tricky to recreate indoors. Unless you live in tropical area, attaining humidity levels for some plants is a challenge.
What To Do Instead:
Add more humidity (duh). Group humidity-loving plants together with a small humidifier. You can also place humidity trays beneath pots, keep them away from air vents and registers, and set plants inside terrariums or glass cloches.
If you live in a part of the country that’s sticky in the summer, give your humidity-lovers a summer vacation outdoors where they’re protected from the hot sun. My ferns and orchids grow like gang-busters during their outdoor break.
But if adding humidity either isn’t in the cards or isn’t working, stick with indoor plants that like it dry, like succulents and cacti. There’s no shame in knowing your limits.
Bad Advice: Feed Me, Seymour!
We all want to do right by our plants, but far too often we kill them with kindness.
You should occasionally fertilize your plants. They need the extra nutrients! However, fertilizer isn’t plant food, it’s “soil food.” Fertilizer adds essential minerals and micro-nutrients to the soil that help a plant sustain new growth. Indoor plants need occasional fertilizer to replace the nutrients they pull from their soil.
But over-fertilizing can have irreversible consequences. Too much fertilizer can burn roots and leaves, cause oddly shaped new leaf growth, and eventually lead to plant death.
What To Do Instead:
Only fertilize a plant when it’s actively growing. This is when it needs and can use the additional nutrients. Otherwise, the fertilizer will sit in the soil, unused, and build up over time with repeated applications.
Most plant experts will tell you not to fertilize in the winter because plants don’t grow in the winter. Indoor plants don’t always get that memo, however, so if you see your plants putting out new leaves, blooming, or getting larger, fertilize those babies!
When you do fertilize, it’s okay to use less than the recommended amount. A little fertilizer will benefit a plant, but too much will not.
A Recovered Black Thumb
It’s tricky to know what a plant needs. They can’t talk and tell us what’s wrong, which makes diagnosing a problem challenging.
Then, when you think you’re doing everything right, it’s frustrating to see your plant problems continue.
If you haven’t had a lot of success with indoor plants, don’t give up! Many issues with indoor plants are from the above bad advice. You’ve stumbled upon some of this in your plant-parenting research, but you now feel confident enough to weed through some misinformation, take what you know is true, and leave the rest.
Welcome to the world of successful plant parenting!
