Been diving deep into lawn care recently. There's a TON, literally hundreds, of products you can spread on your lawn. There's 250 days of the growing season to apply those hundreds of products on. And does it work? Well, this internet comment written by so and so says it does, and their lawn is beautiful, but which of the 15 things they're doing are most pivotal? Or is it multivariate and all the parameters matter and affect and interact with each other?
Unfortunately, I believe it's the latter complex case. pH matters a lot, that affects fertilization uptake, but so does soil bacteria and organic matter, lack of bugs and diseases, proper moisture, and the physical act of cutting the grass is an art and skill, not a mere chore.
Oof, plants need a lot of variables to be in the right ranges, and with soil and watering and weather, it's a lot of fluctuation on top of it all.
Atleast with cooking I've collected a few sources that are consistently good. For new recipes I follow them exactly the first time and disregard any source that has had more than a couple not great recipes, specifically any recipe on all recipes that not a sponsored professional chef.
(for cooking, but also others) There usually are good sources and they fall under two categories (or both): very precise procedure which was actually tested or technique and feedback focused information. The latter being far more important. How to adjust, signs to look for (sound, smell, taste, sight), the proper uses of tools, etc.
"This is how I do it!" blog kinds of recipes usually suffer from hidden techniques or undocumented variables where you try it yourself and it's just awful.
In other words, good advice involves science and art, not just one-off reports of success.
The problem, of course, is that advice focusing on technique and feedback is a lot harder to pass on, and a lot harder to absorb. It's the difference between a 30 second tik tok clip and a one hour in-depth on par-baking pie crusts.
The parent comment's point is not that there is no good cooking advice out there, but instead that there are enough variables that it can't be taken at face value.
I've used a recipe that have worked very well for me but then gave radically different results when I used a different casserole dish. I managed to fix it by taking the lid off later in the process and adjusting the oven temperature by 30°C. Not many recipes mention that amount of temperature variation depending on what cooking equipment you're using.
When cooking, we often optimize for flavor and texture. But what about digestion and nutrition and how each person has different preferences and a different body? It starts getting very complicated quite fast, so many variables...
For a lot of these things, the steps to finding something that works should start with seeing someone who is a specialist of some sort, and, if at all possible, getting them to actually look at whatever you need help for.
For skincare, see a dermatologist. Anyone with skincare issues or concerns, PLEASE just see a dermatologist. They might not tell you what you want to hear, but they can usually give you a good baseline description and diagnosis of what to work on. That's 99% of the battle.
For lawn care, try to talk to a lawn care specialist, hopefully someone who is not trying to sell you something. Golf courses usually have 1 or 2 people that know a lot about grass. Even someone that you think has a really good lawn, ask them to come over and take a look at yours.
Getting advice off the internet is helpful, but I've usually found it to not beat getting someone in person who can actually look at what ever the thing is you're looking for advice for.
I have had a hard time getting any doctor to take a complex issue seriously.
If it can't be "solved" with the standard antidepressant, antibiotic, skin cream, or "diet and exercise"; good luck getting anybody to even try to solve an issue that isn't obvious. (your leg is broken, you have a tumor, etc.)
Medical expertise has a problem with only doing one dimensional solutions for one dimensional issues.
I have had similar experiences. I end up having to do my own research if I want a problem actually solved.
Another thing that bothers me is that they never seem to do any sort of testing. They just throw solutions at the problem until one of them works. It is 2021 we have had the technology to grow something in a culture for over 160 years now, but no just take these antibiotics and if they don't work come back and I'll take another random shot in the dark.
While nominally true for many bacteria, there’s still overwhelmingly many we can’t culture, and those we can take many different media to cultivate.
“Bacterial culture is frequently more difficult and often requires more training than molecular techniques”[1]
There’s a good chance that many doctors are stuck in a mindset that culturing is too difficult, costly, and time consuming to be effective for all but the most resistant infections, but I’m not sure they’re wrong.
That matches my experience. If you see a doctor, they'll try doing whatever their flowchart says to do, and if it doesn't work, they tell you to go away. You'd get results at least as good from just looking at the flowchart yourself.
I did see a dermatologist when the skin on one of my fingertips started peeling uncontrollably. He told me 'We call this "desquamation", which just means "it's peeling". We don't know why it happens or what might make it stop.'
It was a less than ringing endorsement of the idea that if you have a skin problem, you should see a dermatologist.
This is funny because when I saw a dermatologist they just prescribed retinol cream (the textbook solution), didn't look at my skin, and didn't much care for my thoughts or concerns about how to better care for it.
"Just take the cream damnit" - a couple years later I found that the cream was just adjusting the texture of my skin, and likely overly sensitizing it. The doc didn't care and was happy to continue prescribing it.
When doctors abscond their responsibility to know what they're talking about, folks have no choice but to seek it out. Many people have this experience with physicians of all stripes.
I just had a doctor completely mis-prescribe Azithromycin to me. They prescribed 5x the correct dose. I even asked them three times about it before leaving the appointment and they looked at me like I was crazy. Luckily my parents worked for Pfizer for a combined 80 years and confirmed my suspicions before I started taking it.
I had doctors give teenage me antibiotics for acne. Later on prednisone I believe. Jesus christ dermatologists are fucking awful. Never told me I needed to start washing my towels, bedsheets, pillowcases more often or suggested using a moisturizer.
Haha, yeah, doctors are pretty terrible. I had neck and jaw pain, and my Chinese-born dentist said “Well, I know how much you Americans like drugs and surgery, and there are some of those that will help, but really you’ll probably be fine if you just get neck and shoulder massages occasionally”
Sure enough, it worked. I was just hurting my neck by using my PDA too much with my neck craned downward, and getting massages/exercise or just not using a mobile device fixed the problem completely
> I had neck and jaw pain, and my Chinese-born dentist said “Well, I know how much you Americans like drugs and surgery, and there are some of those that will help, but really you’ll probably be fine if you just get neck and shoulder massages occasionally”
To be totally fair, I did recently seek help for recurring pain in the back of my head (also the top of the neck, but I described it as the head) and the urgent care nurse did some simple nerve damage tests, asked me about my sleeping posture, and told me the problem was likely that I was sleeping wrong and I should take a different position. He was right.
Of course, he wasn't a doctor either. :/
If you want to turn the tables on your Chinese-born dentist, ask him about the Chinese habit of stopping by the hospital for intravenous saline solution whenever you're feeling like you might have a cold.
I had this happen too, with a topical steroid. Went to another dermo a few years later and they gasped out loud when I showed them my old prescription. Overdose of topical steroids can cause permanent damage to the skin.
For skincare, see a dermatologist. Anyone with skincare issues or concerns, PLEASE just see a dermatologist. They might not tell you what you want to hear, but they can usually give you a good baseline description and diagnosis of what to work on. That's 99% of the battle.
Realistically, this isn't good advice - you probably just want to see your regular doctor. The waiting list for a dermatologist can be long, but that GP will probably get you in quickly. They will recognize worrysome skin patches that might be cancer, and can generally do basic things to help common skin conditions (athletes foot, cysts, poison ivy and other common rashes, and so on).
Besides, a lot of folks can't just see a dermatologist - not without a referral, anyway.
In general I think the size of the controversy tends to be inversely proportional to the size of the effect.
This seems to apply to a lot of things, from how many reps you do in the gym to how you apply thermal paste to a CPU to how best to cook a steak. It's not that you can't mess these things up, but there does seem to be a rather large number of methods that work pretty well, and the difference in effect between "pretty well" and "optimal" seems overall to be small enough to allow for controversy.
This is especially true in cooking. There is like one method for macron because if you mess it up it won't work. But there are loads of debates about 'real Carbonara' because spaghetti with fatty pork (e.g. guanciale, bacon), egg, and cheese (and maybe cream depending on who you ask), maybe black pepper - you can't fail.
I think it's pretty generally applicable. If you think about it, there couldn't be a controversy if one of the options was clearly and demonstrably better than the other.
Even manufactured controversies like 5G crackpots or snake oil cures seems to often revolve around these nebulous long term effects that hover like a mirage right on the precipice of what's testable, hinted at with a generous interpretation of the scientific literature, but never quite rigorously demonstrated.
I think a lab soil test ($20 or so) and following the basics of weed control (Google “triangle weed control”) and soil amendments as guided by the test will get you a 90-95th percentile lawn without tons of agonizing effort or much expense.
Add irrigation and you’ll be at 97+%-ile.
The frustration I have with my lawn hobby is that it looks “great” to most visitors but I know all the flaws and where I’ve still got improvements to make.
All our neighbors use lawn companies and apply fertilizer and pesticides constantly. They don't have soil anymore. It's mid to light brown dirt. At some point, we watched a video of a Gabe Brown presentation (author of From Dirt to Soil). Our new, hold-my-beer, "game" is to do as little as possible to our lawn - other than keeping it long - while still having it greener than everyone else. One factor that turns out to be critical is encouraging clover. Clover apparently fixes nitrogen, so a good grass/clover mix can be remarkably low maintenance.
> Or is it multivariate and all the parameters matter and affect and interact with each other?
I've been saying this a lot lately (in different forms):
Reality is not a single variable problem; it's a multivariate puzzle which is never as simple as a single cause -> effect scenario.
This applies to absolutely everything these days, from growing plants to politics. In many ways this is the failure of the internet/social media. Everything tends towards simple single variable explanations that are never, ever, in alignment with reality. And yet, entire populations become divided along these simple lines. Even when talking about how to grow a lawn.
My main question is, how many of these products are actually safe to be using to grow food? How many contain heavy metals or dangerous particles that just haven't been tested for?
If you find some good resources can you post them/links. It’s so hard to find good informative websites that I can burn days scouring the internet for decent repositorys.
Weed control can come in many forms. Some plants do better in more acidic soil vs basic, and native grasses tend to have a range of optimal pH different from broadleaf plants. As well, cutting strategy can help via shading--if the grasses are taller than the weeds, they get more light and grow taller still and choke out the weeds from getting sun.
Part of the problem with lawns in general is the ideal lawn, like the magazine lawn, tends to be a monoculture. But a really healthy, low-maintenance pasture tends to be a polyculture of many grasses, a few legumes (e.g., clover), and the occasional broadleaf (dandelions are great for instance when it comes to improving soil structure--their roots can really help aerate compacted soil).
Caring for a houseplant is like caring for a baby. There are things that work, and things that don't, but not necessarily for your baby. You won't really know what's going on unless you pay close attention to it. And if it seems unhappy, you won't really know how to make it happy until you try a few things out.
Baby advice and houseplant advice isn't "bad", it's just subjective.
also: my houseplants don't get big because I don't take care of them! the ones I left outside "to die" have grown substantially... i even left a bunch of succulents outside, that were sitting in pots with no drainage, overflowing with water for 6 months.... they're fine. they "should" be dead as doornails. shrug
Had friends in Hawaii. They had such beautiful indoor orchids that I commented on their green thumbs... to which their response was, "Oh no, we kill them inside and then put them outside to recover and bring back in the ones that are blooming".
What bothers me is the advice you find all over the internet that "you are probably overwatering your plants" is only correct if you assume the reader knows nothing about plants and just keep them soaking all the time. Overwatering is NOT a Hofstadter's law where it happens even if you try to correct for it. Reality is container plants are a pretty complex system that an amateur is likely to mess up but not always in a particular direction, and the answer is to be anal about watching all the time.
The Aussie national public broadcaster, the ABC, has the fantastic Gardening Australia show that has been going for 32 years (in its current format). It's not too pretentious and is full of great technical pragmatic tips from knowledgeable professional horticulturalists and experienced amateurs. You might like this series on indoor plants as we call houseplants. https://www.abc.net.au/gardening/the-great-indoors--containe...
Caring for houseplants is quite hard. I have 8 and my friend recently gave up his job to grow Bonsai trees full time. The amount I learned from him was quite interesting, I almost felt dumb by the end. My plants do fine, but they could've been doing way better.
For my Bonsais, I didn't know that they should be given filtered water. The Bay area has particularly nasty water, so immediately my plants were getting spots. Second, when you repot in the summers, the soil should be aligned to where you're growing. Third, East facing windows that cliff the sun at the hottest part of the day are imperative. I then asked him, "Wait, I can't leave them in the same spot all year?" and his immediate reply was, "Hell no, not unless you plan to layer shades in front of them, but I bet that's not why you put them where you did." For watering guidance, he said, "Stick your finger into the soil down to the knuckle, if it's dry, water them. If it's still wet, let it dry out."
Keeping plants alive is relatively easy; helping them thrive is another matter entirely.
Trees and plants in the wild are watered by rain. Don't use the stuff out of your tap/faucet. Chlorine is great for killing off bacteria in stagnant water in pipes and so on but not so good for your plants. They don't care about Legionnaires etc that kills us lot off. Your plants want the raw stuff out of the sky so get a water butt and feed it from your house roof.
In the wild, plants are not surrounded by walls, floors and ceilings. They are, however, surrounded by other plants and trees that are trying to out compete them for the basics - water and sunlight.
Indoors the basics are: Water: rainwater only, unless it runs out then tap for a few days at most. Moist but not wet. Light: Some but not direct all day.
Now, some plants prefer more or less eg a Venus fly trap prefers constantly wet roots and direct hard sunshine. A orchid might like 7-14 days of drought and then a good dampening for a day or so (never static water).
It really isn't rocket science. You just have to remember that plants never evolved to live inside houses. Your mate that said "For watering guidance ..." is spot on. Just make it rain water and not tap if you can.
I had such a big problem using tap water on peppers and marijuana. Turned out it was to basic and the water was causing them to slowly die. I had to treat my water to fix the pH every time I watered. Such a hassle.
No need for rainwater; chlorine evaporates, so leaving a bucket of tap water overnight will dechlorinate it naturally. Some particularly fussy plants do require extra filtered water, though.
Chlorine yes, Chloramine no. You need to know what your water utility is using, and be aware that it can change from time to time. Sometimes they'll use Chlorine most of the time, but periodically use Chloramine to address parts of the network that may not get sufficient Chlorine treatment.
Sodium Metabisulfite (Campden) will reliably remove either, as will reverse osmosis.
EBMUD actually uses the Pardee Reservoir. But it's a trivial distinction because it's just upstream of the Camanche, both getting water from the Mokelumna watershed.
Yes it is and it's perfectly fine for house plants. TDS (total dissolved solids) is usually below 30 PPM, at least for me. But, there are parts of the Bay Area with less pure water.
The parameters relevant to plants (EC, pH, chloride, etc.) are usually in the secondary standards, rather than the primary standards most important for human health.
San Jose groundwater is terrible, EC ~ 700 uS/cm out of the tap. I wrote
to model the custom fertilizer blend that I'm developing now, since the cal/mag in the water plus the phosphate from the acid I use to neutralize the carbonate significantly shift the nutrient profile. That's obviously beyond typical houseplant practice, but professionals growing in non-soil media (nurseries, vegetable growers, etc.) do roughly the same.
I think that's true about surviving versus thriving. I have a bonsai nursery and 'bonsai' is one area where there is a lot of serious interest. Lots of disagreements but a much higher rate of expert knowledge. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves what we want from our plants and adapt accordingly. Sometimes simple is better even when the results are less spectacular
It may still be better than nothing, since they didn't test nothing. Citric acid was better than vinegar for them, but still showed worse yield than phosphoric. I tried citric acid myself and found that its pH down effect disappeared within hours, as some combination of the plant itself and the root zone microbiota broke down the citrate:
The professionals generally use mineral acids, and I believe that's with good reason. Of those phosphoric is the safest to handle, though a significant corrosive hazard in concentrated form; carefully dilute to ~2% for day to day use. You could also try monopotassium phosphate, but if your water is hard then you'd need such massive amounts that the extra K and P may become problematic.
Where do your get all this info from? This shit is fantastic. I’ve been scouring the wasteland of the internet for decent plant knowledge and seem to go from oasis to oasis in a vast desert of seo garbage
It's helpful to learn and use professional terminology, to get away from heavily SEO'd search terms. A search for "when to water potted plant" returns endless variations of the same mediocre article, but "coir irrigation frequency" returns good stuff.
I have, and have had, numerous thriving houseplants. My largest plants right now are about five feet tall. I also have three orchids that do wonderfully, a selection of cacti, etc. I do still kill plants from time to time but it's rare. In any case, I don't really agree with much of the advice in this thread. In order, the most important things IMHO are:
1) Caring: you actually have to care about the plants. This requires that you notice how they are doing and if they aren't "happy", taking action to try and improve their environment.
2) Light: if the light is bad, you're screwed. People keep talking about overwatering but not providing plants with enough light is just as bad and probably worse. Plants indoor get far less light than they do outdoors. If you have a very sunny room, in most cases the only way plants will do poorly is by totally neglecting to water them.
3) Water: not particularly difficult. With most plants you only need to water when the soil is completely dry. What I would especially suggest you do if you are starting out with houseplants is to purchase plants that show, by virtue of their foliage drooping, if they don't have enough water. The leaves of a peace lily will droop. The leaves of devil's ivy will start looking floppy. I've noticed that my spider plant's leaves seem to become paler. Some plants (e.g. ones that look like palm trees) will lose their foliage, starting at the bottom.
In any case, if you have a plant like this, it is visibly telling you it needs water, so it's not hard to comply. It can also serve as a sort of canary in the coal mine for your other plants.
That's honestly about it. I repot the occasional plant, and sometimes I do a little light fertilizing. But if you have a plant that is doing poorly, my advice in almost all cases is simple: ensure it gets more light, and don't water it until it's totally dried out.
> To get an even better answer, ask a better question: ‘I water my sansevieria (snake plant) about once a week, and it’s not in direct sun. I’ve had it for six months and it was nice when I got it. But now the tips are brown, what am I doing wrong?’
I agree with the author that we need to see more examples of larger, older plants to get an idea of what our lil plant bbs could be someday. Fortunately there are some great Facebook groups for different genera, and of course there’s https://www.reddit.com/r/matureplants/
Reddit is the only major site that still gets away with outrageously shitty engineering. There’s no possible way to follow this link on iOS. The link shows only a link to open in app but they’re so shitty that it opens the app in the app store not the actual app.
Recently visited a local botanical garden and saw their mature Ficus lyrata (Fiddle lead fig) and was astounded to see mine at 6 feet tall was merely a juvenile branch on the entire tree.
The author has also a good point in that maturing plants is a lot of work and as they become more of themselves they become more than, imo, what people would consider aesthetically appropriate.
M.deiciosa is a hot plant right now and maybe in these 5+1 apartments someone will live in one long enough to let it really start branching up and out and taking up a valuable amount of living real estate. It also has these, to my fiancee, 'penile' roots that are to her unsightly.
They make me feel more alive seeing the plant thrive and do its thing.
Biggest problem for indoor plants is lack of light. Get a cheap photometer and check. Eyes are terrible at judging light intensity.. if the plant never gets light sufficient for basic metabolism, it will die sooner or later. Bare minimum full shade is like 10000 lux.. indoor lighting often doesn't get above 1000.
And the good news is 4 foot LED tube lights are cheap, inexpensive to run and easy to mount with just two-sided tape. It’s a simple DIY project to mount LED tubes on the underside of a table and put that table on top of another table…and you can grow whatever you like. Plants won’t just survive but actually thrive and flower. Doesn’t look half-bad either.
What's that you say? Off topic? Yea I agree, but...
As a systems and network administrator I know that the vast majority of outages are human initiated. Maintenance gone bad. Simple mistakes such as unplugging the wrong cable. Stupid stuff. Sometimes thresholds such as disk usage or other resources get exceeded or a part just wears out and breaks, but usually it's us stupid humans fucking something up with our own hands where it would have been just fine if you had left it alone.
So there's your servers are houseplants advice. Stop touching them. Stop doing stuff. Leave it alone.
Of course that's impossible. We have to get new plants installed and have to find that equilibrium they like to thrive.
But when you find it, leave them the fuck alone and don't break it.
Anyway, since you are here: You may kill your plants with tap water. Plants evolved to get demineralized rainwater. The salts of tap water will build up in the soil, slowly poisoning the plant. Additionally the pot is also the plant’s potty: It disposes excess minerals and waste through the roots, and expects the rain to flush it away.
It’s best to water your plants with demineralized water, but you can also use (old) boiled and cooled down water, which lost at least some CO2 and consequently fell out calcium. In any case, if you water your plant, do so thoroughly, until water comes out at the bottom. Let it collect for a few minutes and then dispose it. Do not let it reabsorb! This will help the plant getting rid of salts and also helps not getting the soil soaking wet.
Btw. this is also why irrigation is a problem for food security. Using straight underground water for crops in hot regions will only work for a few years, until the soil is dead for good….
Edit: Oh yeah, and IIRC the snake plants leaf tips are crucial for growth. They may be hurt from handling in the store and will consequently not grow in length anymore. Not sure it has anything to do with watering at all. My snake plant got “store leaves”, which haven’t changed at all over the years, got brown just at the very end, and new leaves, which are almost double the length and totally healthy. Maybe a brown tip is just the normal display of a leaf without a head (cell).
Fun fact: Did you know snake plants store “sun energy” at daylight, and then do the rest of photosynthesis at night? So they do not lose water due to evaporation as much, when opening their pores for gas exchange! Pretty cool, eh?!
Yes, cool, didn’t know. Reminds me of how some plants move water from deep in the soil up the roots at night — to hydrate the soil around the dry roots near ground level for when the day comes
Does leaving tap water out help with the salt problem? I've read that after 4 days, most of the chlorine will evaporate from tap water - and this is good for plants.
Hypochlorite (like they add for disinfection) will break down on standing, or faster with aeration. Chloramine (also added for disinfection) won't, which is why aquarists use various chemical treatments to remove that.
Neither is too important for plants, though. The usual problem for plants is chloride, which can't be removed except by processes like reverse osmosis or distillation. Most plants can easily survive chloride at typical concentrations in tap water; but if you don't water to runoff then that concentration may slowly increase in the root zone, eventually harming the plant. You typically want something around 10% runoff, though that will vary with your plant species, water, fertilizer, etc.
Others have answered the question already, but I want to extent on my comment: Long standing water, same as boiled water loses some CO2. CO2 in water forms carbonic acid in part, which dissolves calcium salts. Removing the acid, will make some of the calcium salts insoluble (that’s why you get a buildup in water boilers). Most other salts are unaffected by that. So the disposal of collected water under the pot is without an alternative. Even if you’re using demineralized water, you need to flush the plant’s toilet.
Yes, but that's a good thing. You are much more likely to burn your plant with fertilizer, than starving it. If you think about the typical environment most plants adapted to, you will not have a year's worth of N2, P, ... supplied once a year, but a constant, very low exposure through rain and continuous organic decay/production processes in the soil and above. For the most part, plants rely on osmosis, the capillary effect and evaporation to transport nutrients. Salt levels, including fertilizer, modify the osmotic costs and limits.
I think one of the biggest misconceptions about plants is: they only need water (and light).
Yes plants need water, but they can't grow on water alone. They need all kinds of minerals that are in the soil. When those are gone the plant will die.
When you repot plants you add fresh soil so you also add minerals. But when you don't repot you need to add those minerals once in a while.
Tip for aquarium owners: a lot of plants benefit from the 'dirt' in dirty aquarium water.
An also lesser known fact is that there is a huge symbiosis between bacteria, fungi and the roots. So in fact you also need to keep them alive.
If you like aquaponics, then take a look at Goliad Farms. He raises greenhouses full of tropical fish, relying entirely on plants to remove ammonium from the water.
And yeah, that root zone microbiome is complex, though somewhat different in containers than in nature. In soil-like potting mix, you're generally guaranteed to have nitrifying bacteria, so ammonium fertilizers are still generally safe to use. (Ammonium can easily become toxic to plants; but soil bacteria oxidize it to nitrate, which plants tolerate in higher concentrations.) Stuff like sulfur to amend soil pH doesn't necessarily work in containers though, since you don't necessarily get the bacteria that oxidize that to sulfuric acid. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria for legumes may also not be present unless deliberately inoculated.
The plants would die without that microbiome in nature, but with human help it's not mandatory. Many hydroponic methods run with a root zone that's as sterile as possible, and the only major change required is to supply most (~90%) of the nitrogen as nitrate.
> Tip for aquarium owners: a lot of plants benefit from the 'dirt' in dirty aquarium water.
There are some interesting-looking mini-aquaponics systems out there that could be useful for anyone who already knows how to take care of a fish tank.
I've read the part about roots several times and don't understand it. Is there some intermediate level of actionable advice between "water once a week" and this? If anyone can explain it to me in a way that makes sense to a programmer it would be much appreciated. I do have multi-year surviving house plants but worry about their roots.
> This comes about by having the roots well distributed in free-draining soil so that water and oxygen can feed the plant. From this you can infer there might be a problem If water runs right through the pot, and/or you squeeze the pot at its base and it’s rock solid. If so, take the pot off and have a look. From this you can also infer that, repotting into a much larger pot will just leave the roots buried in a mound of cold, wet soil, far from any roots. You might also see that a root-bound plant might not even need to be repotted, or can be repotted back into the same pot.
I also found that advice about as confusing as all the other consumer-targeted houseplant advice. If you've got some time to invest, then I believe you'll find that advice for professional growers makes a lot more sense, much more quantitative and backed by trials and chemical or biological mechanisms. I quite like:
That's a guide to operating a nursery, developed by academics seeking to distill the scientific state of the art into something practically useful with basic equipment.
Specifically as to judging how much to water, I go mostly by weight. Thoroughly wet the medium until water runs from the holes in the pot, and then don't water again until the weight drops below some fraction (e.g., 20%) of that maximum. You can use a scale, or judge by hand with practice.
You can also wait until the plants show drought stress. For example, they might visibly wilt, or succulent leaves and herbaceous stems may go from turgid to limp. That's probably not optimal, but it's better than overwatering.
Finally, you can also pot in media with very low water holding capacity, like a blend of normal potting mix and perlite. This makes it near-impossible to overwater, but the tradeoff is that frequent (e.g., every few days) watering then becomes mandatory.
Honestly don't worry about it. If your plants are growing and seem healthy, they are fine. Just ensure your plants have a pot that is appropriate to their size. Off the top of my head and based on my current plants, I'd say a plant that's 1 to 2 feet tall needs a pot around 6 inches in diameter and maybe 8 inches tall. 2 to 3 feet, 10 inches and similar height. 4 to 5 feet, 12 inches and 12 to 16 inches tall. Past that, and you don't need any advice on plants.
For many indoor plants, soil acts as a porous environment for roots to hang out in, where there’s humidity and air. Too much soil act as nothing but a wet blanket, too root-bound and the roots are not held in soil at all, so are poorly fed. Water only to rehydrate the soil, not to keep roots chronically wet
The most bewildering tip I always see and often hear recited is that a plant likes it to be moved/rotated. Like wtf, which plant gets rotated in nature???
Generally, some people like to think they know better what the plant needs than itself.
I went from being talked in to overcaring to the probable most careless approach. My plants get water when the soil is dry. That's it.
Gladly, I also ended up stopping to interfere with e.g. how they grow and I've now noticed that they started to look "wild" and healthy.
Something I learned to do is to only water the leaves (ie make them wet). And if the soil is very dry, to pour water directly to the roots.
My reasoning being that rain unless it is heavy, doesn't actually reach the soil directly and then there is the matter of water coming out through the openings in the pot if there is too much of it.
That's the thing - when the plant is outside it will get sun from multiple directions as the sun moves, but when it inside the light will only be coming from the window.
And even outside the sun is shining more from one direction (south here in the northern hemisphere), since it is below the horizon at times, which will often cause plants and trees to have more branches and leaves facing that direction.
When it comes to houseplants you just have to ask my mom and you will know everything that’s to be known. If there is a problem she needs maybe 10 seconds to take a look and give you the solution.
They should be fertilized at the same rate at which the plants are consuming the fertilizer. Professionals will often judge this by measuring the electrical conductivity (EC) of the solution leaching from the bottom of the pot. The fertilizers are mostly ionic (excluding urea, though that becomes ionic after breakdown to ammonia), so that conductivity is roughly proportional to the root zone fertilizer concentration.
These meters used to be expensive, but you can get them for a few dollars on eBay, AliExpress, etc. now. Such measurement is now de rigeur in hydroponics. It works in soil-like potting mixes too, though only the most technically sophisticated hobbyists there (e.g., many orchidists) have adopted so far.
house plant care is not that hard to automate (talking about water/feeding)... of course if you are doing bonsai culture, you will have to manually trim it (but I grew bonsai pepper plants with minimal care... no fruits yet though)
Unfortunately, I believe it's the latter complex case. pH matters a lot, that affects fertilization uptake, but so does soil bacteria and organic matter, lack of bugs and diseases, proper moisture, and the physical act of cutting the grass is an art and skill, not a mere chore.
Oof, plants need a lot of variables to be in the right ranges, and with soil and watering and weather, it's a lot of fluctuation on top of it all.