If you are known to turn a lush house plant into a rotting carcass, here are a few expert tips for making greenery thrive.
Once a year, I get inspired to try — yet again — to fill my home with beautiful house plants. I wander the aisles in my local nursery, pick out a few plants that look nice, bring them home and begin the process of slowly killing them.
To be fair, I’ve gotten better at caring for plants over the years, by which I mean they now die a more lingering death than they used to. But I still have a lot to learn. So this week, I interviewed four plant experts so that I could benefit from their wisdom and share some key tips with you.
Choose the right plants.
It turns out that picking plants based on how they look isn’t the best way to find greenery that will thrive in your home. For instance, if you choose a plant that is native to temperate locales, like a juniper bonsai, it probably won’t love the tropical conditions inside your always-70-degree home, and it may die, said Ian Brown, a plant specialist with PlantHero, a Seattle-based company that provides virtual personalized plant care.
Other plants that you probably want to avoid, but that are often sold at nurseries and stores like Home Depot, are majestic palms, Mr. Brown said. They are quite temperamental.
Plants that grow well indoors, and that are relatively easy to care for, include sansevieria (snake plants), philodendrons (plants that often have large waxy leaves), pothos (vines with heart-shaped leaves), tradescantia (spider plants) and ficus (fig trees), the experts told me.
Let them have light.
Although some plants are sold as “shade-loving” plants, few plants will thrive in the darkest corner of your living room, said Christopher Satch, a plant scientist and a professor at the New York Botanical Garden, who also shares plant care tips on Instagram. “Plants did not evolve to live in dark caves,” he said, as they require light to make energy and sustain themselves.
His key piece of advice: “Put all your plants in a window.” (You may have heard that plants can be burned by too much light, but this rarely happens to plants kept indoors on windowsills, he said.) Alessandro Ossola, an agronomist at the University of California, Davis, suggests rotating your plants each time you water them, so that all sides of the plant get sunlight.
If you don’t have much light in your home, Mr. Brown recommends getting a cast-iron plant (also known as aspidistra), which is “the easiest to care for, lowest-light plant on the market,” he said.
Water properly.
Watering plants can be tricky: Some people over-water, meaning they water too frequently, while others under-water, watering too rarely. Although neither is a great idea, over-watering kills plants more easily, Mr. Brown said. Different plants need different amounts of water, and how much they need also depends on their living conditions.
Dr. Ossola recommended a smartphone app called Planta, which can identify your house plants, share care and location recommendations, and provide watering reminders.
Mr. Satch, however, says that rather than relying on a watering schedule, he recommends that people check each plant every few days by sticking a finger into the soil, about two knuckles deep, and that they only water when the soil feels dusty and dry. “If it feels even a little moist, wait another day,” he said. (Mr. Satch is not a fan of moisture meters: “I haven’t found any one of them that worked properly,” he said.)
As for how to water, Mr. Satch said, it’s best to use lukewarm rather than cold water, because cold water can shock plants. He said to water slowly, too — otherwise the water will flow through the soil and not be absorbed. The goal, basically, is to saturate the plant with water as if it’s just been through a rainstorm. “The trick is to mimic nature,” he said.
Prune if you’re not happy with how your plant looks.
I’ll be honest: Pruning terrifies me. I’m always afraid I’m going to cut off an essential part of the plant. So I was relieved to learn that even if you don’t know much about pruning, “Chances are, you’re not going to kill the plant,” said Michelle Bidwell, a horticulturist at Cornell Botanic Gardens in Ithaca, N.Y.
You also don’t have to prune most house plants. “Pruning indoors, for the most part, is an aesthetic choice,” Mr. Satch said. You can prune if your plant is getting too tall or leggy, with long stems and spaced-out leaves, for instance, but you can also leave it alone.
Some outdoor plants, on the other hand, benefit from pruning. Flowers like marigolds and petunias, for instance, should be deadheaded, Mr. Satch said — meaning that dying flowers should be removed to promote the growth of more. Ms. Bidwell often gives her hanging container plants “bowl cuts” when the tops aren’t growing well, she said, because doing so encourages more top growth.
Fertilize in the spring and summer.
After growing in the same soil for a while, plants will deplete it of key nutrients, and can benefit from added fertilizer (or you can re-pot the plant in new soil). Experts have their favorite fertilizers — Mr. Brown said he preferred Osmocote, while Mr. Satch recommended Dyna-Gro. Fertilizing frequency depends on what you use, but with most fertilizers, Mr. Satch recommends fertilizing about once a month for indoor plants in the spring and summer, and less frequently (if at all) in the winter months. You will want to fertilize outdoor plants more frequently: about once a week in the spring and summer, Mr. Satch said.
If you’re having problems with small flies called fungus gnats, Mr. Brown added, organic fertilizer may be the culprit, because it serves as a food source for these pests. Switching over to a chemical fertilizer, which is absorbed by plants more quickly, could help.
If your plant looks sad, problem-solve.
Sometimes, if your plant is sad, you can diagnose the problem based on what you’re seeing. If the soil is dry and the leaves are drooping, you probably need to water more frequently. If the soil is wet, there’s black mushiness at the base and your plant is slowly collapsing, you probably need to water less frequently, Mr. Satch said. If your plant is stringy and not able to hold itself up, or if the new leaves are smaller and paler than older leaves, it probably needs more light.
Plants can also get bacterial or fungal infections. If the leaves have unevenly distributed black or brown spots or tips, it’s probably an infection, Mr. Satch said. If the leaves have evenly distributed black or brown dots, it may be a problem with your fertilizer or the humidity in your home.
Other problems are harder to diagnose. For instance, yellow leaves are a general sign of plant stress and can have many causes. If your plant is struggling and you’re not sure why, experts suggest trial and error. “You really have to be a detective,” Mr. Satch said.
First, try changing your watering schedule or the amount of light it gets — those are the two biggest culprits, Ms. Bidwell said. Perhaps your pot doesn’t have holes in it and your plant wants more drainage. Maybe you need to fertilize more, or your water is the wrong pH. (Ms. Bidwell said most plants liked water with a pH between 5.6 and 6.2.)
Don’t let fear keep you from trying again.
The experts I spoke with all encouraged me not to consider myself a hopeless case, even though I have killed more plants than I’d like to admit. Everyone learns by doing, they said. When I referred to my past “mistakes,” for instance, Ms. Bidwell corrected me. “You didn’t make any mistakes,” she said. “You just learned something new about a plant. I’m always tweaking my garden, because I still haven’t gotten it right.”
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