The three things that actually matter
Okay. So last time we talked about my dead pothos and how nobody in this room needs to feel dumb about a dead plant. Good. Moving on.
Here's the part I wish someone had just told me straight instead of making me read forty blog posts to figure out. There are really only three things that decide whether a houseplant lives or dies. Light, water, and the pot it's sitting in. That's it. Everything else — fertilizer, humidity, that mister you bought, the little spike thing you stick in the soil — is decoration on top of these three. If you get these three right, most plants are honestly kind of hard to kill. If you get them wrong, no amount of fussing over the plant will save it.
Let's go through them.
Light
This is the one nobody measures. People guess, and they almost always guess wrong.
Here's the thing about light: a room that feels bright to you, standing in it, checking your phone, chatting with someone, is often pretty dim from a plant's point of view. Your eyes adjust automatically. Plants don't get that luxury. So "bright room" and "bright enough for a plant" are two different sentences, and most of us don't know it.
Practical version: stand near the spot where your plant lives. If you can read a book comfortably without turning on a lamp, that's decent light. If you're squinting or it's a little gray in there, that's low light, and you need to pick a plant that's fine with that — a snake plant, a pothos, one of the ZZ plants — instead of asking a plant that wants sun to be happy in a corner.
And don't put anything in full, direct afternoon sun through a window unless the tag specifically says it wants that. That was my first pothos mistake. I thought I was giving it the good spot. I was cooking it.
Water
This is the one I bring up every single class because it's the one that actually kills the most plants, and it's not the direction people expect.
Most plants die from too much water, not too little. People water out of guilt. You look at the plant, you feel like you haven't done anything for it lately, so you water it, and that feels like care. It's not. Roots need to breathe. If soil stays wet all the time, roots rot, and a rotting plant looks a lot like a thirsty plant from the top — droopy, sad leaves — so people respond by watering it more. It's a bad cycle and it's the one that got my first pothos.
Practical version: stick your finger in the soil, first knuckle deep, before you water anything. Dry? Water it. Still damp? Leave it alone, check again in a couple days. Most houseplants would rather be a little too dry than a little too wet.
And a plug I'll keep making all class: our tap water out here is hard, there's a lot of mineral in it, and it's the same stuff that leaves the white crust on your shower door. Let your water sit out overnight in an open container before you use it if you can. Your plant's leaf tips will thank you.
Pot and drainage
Third thing, and it's the one people skip because it's boring. Your pot needs a hole in the bottom. I don't care how cute the pot is. If water can't get out, it just sits at the bottom, the roots sit in it, and you're back to rot.
If you fall in love with a pot that has no hole — and you will, they're everywhere — use it as the outer decorative pot and keep the plant in its plain plastic nursery pot inside it, so you can lift it out and dump the extra water after you water. Takes ten extra seconds. Saves the plant.
Here's where I'll tell you about Courtney, from my office. She came to me with a plant she said was "basically dead," and she meant it — droopy, yellow leaves, sitting in a pot that had clearly never once been emptied of water. I pulled it out, and the bottom of the root ball was just mush. I cut off everything that was rotted, repotted it into something with drainage, and let it sit dry for a while before I watered it again. It came back. Courtney called me a plant witch after that, and I've repeated that compliment probably eleven times since, so, there you go, take that for what it's worth. It wasn't witchcraft. It was a hole in the bottom of a pot and me not panicking.
Before next time
Go check three things at home this week: how bright your plant's spot actually is when you stand in it, whether your pot has a drainage hole, and whether the soil's still wet from the last time you watered. Don't fix anything yet, just look. We'll do the fixing part together next class.