Watering is one of the main ways you care for your houseplant, so it’s important to get it right. That can be tricky sometimes. Thankfully, we’ve created little care cards (more on those in our last post) so you can at-a-glance identify your plant’s watering needs. In this post, we’ll go deeper in depth about what each of the droplet icons mean.
Our watering guide is based on frequency of waterings, with plants that seldom need watering on the left and ones that need frequent watering on the right. Of course, that leaves three in-betweens, which can seem difficult. But we’ll give some examples of what that watering looks like.
Also remember that the meaning of “less frequent” and “more frequent” may change throughout the year. Plants may need less water in winter vs summer. The location of the plant in your home might also affect this. Our care cards give you an idea of how often you need to be checking in with your plant.
Top tip: set a reminder for when to at least check how your plant is doing in terms of water. Trust us, you probably won’t remember. It’s ok to set a reminder on your phone or mark down a regular day in your calendar. Regularity will be good for your plant.
Care card watering info in detail
Things like cactus get the droplet all the way on the left circled on our care cards. These are things that would like to be watered thoroughly and then want their soil to dry out pretty much completely before they’re watered again.
The second droplet in includes things like snake plants. Things like this don’t want to sit completely dried out for very long but they really must not be overwatered.
Calatheas are an example of plants that like a Goldilocks amount of watering: not too much, not too little, just right. You might check in on these plants one or twice a week, depending on what your home environment is like and what time of year it is. They want to be evenly moist, you might say.
Moving up in frequency, these plants will need to be check a little more often. They too want to be evenly watered but are a little less chill about their watering needs. Nerve plants are an example here.
And finally, we have the very thirsty plants like coffee plants. These will want to be well watered but be careful to not let them sit in a puddle of water. Nobody likes that. You will just need to check in with them frequently to make sure they are staying moist but not too moist.
The next layer of your plants liquid needs is humidity, which we’ll talk about in another blog post soon!