5 Easy Ways to Tell When to Water Houseplants

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So today I’m going to talk to you about five ways to see if it’s time to water your houseplants. Watering, honestly, is one of the most difficult things to do. The act of watering obviously is simple: you fill up your watering vessel and you water the plant. But when to water, and should I water, and should I wait to water? I don’t know what to do. It is much more difficult to decide when the right time is to water.

There are some really important reasons not to overwater, as it can lead to root rot in plants, and if it isn’t treated and stopped, the plant will end up dying. So it is really important to water your plants properly. Obviously, underwatering your plants can be very detrimental to certain plants, like maidenhair ferns, for instance. So that’s another thing to keep in mind.

When to water? Believe me, even for me sometimes, I’m in the location I wash, and I wanted to write the weather. That has happened here with Henry, the lovely rubber tree that is in my root rot series. We saved Henry! It all started last September 2019, and he’s doing really well; he has gained about six inches within the last month or so. He is really sprouting up. For obvious reasons, I’ve been very careful not to overwater him. However, I don’t want to drought him either because he’s still doing much better but is still, so to speak, a little thin. I still have to backslide.

I always make sure before I water him, I don’t just randomly water him. I make sure that he indeed needs watering. So what you want to do is keep that in mind. If you have time on Thursday to water, and you really would like to water all your houseplants on Thursday because you’re not going to have time the rest of the week, it doesn’t always work. It’s kind of like kids when they want to eat and they don’t want to eat. Young kids eat when they’re ready and they won’t eat when they aren’t ready.

Use that same analogy with your houseplants. It’s good every Thursday to check all your houseplants to see if they need watering. But keep in mind that some of your houseplants may not need water until Sunday. You’ll just have to take note of that and try to make some room in your schedule for that. The good news is that a lot of houseplants like to approach dryness before you water them. In that case, you generally find that a lot of houseplants don’t need watering once a week. So keep that in mind; you may be able to skip two weeks. It’s not really skipping two weeks; your plant very well may not need water for two weeks.

That’s especially common when you repot plants; you may not need to water a plant after repotting for a month. So that is something else to keep in mind.

Okay, so I am going to talk about the first way to check if your plant needs watering. I’m going to use Henry here as an example. It’s good if you can use more than one technique for checking the need for watering because that way you can be sure.

The first thing I like to do is use a moisture meter. Here’s a moisture meter; it’s very easy to use. The moisture meters generally have a scale, where one to three is in the red, indicating that things are very dry for the plant. Four to seven indicates medium moisture, and eight, nine, and ten indicate that the soil is generally very moist. With Henry here, I’ve been very careful to get him into just pretty much the red zone—just into the dry zone—before I water him again, so that we don’t set up that root rot cycle.

One thing to keep in mind with most houseplants is that this doesn’t apply to maidenhair ferns, which do like to be moist, and African violets like to be on the moisture side too, or they will stop flowering. However, for a lot of houseplants, you’re better off erring on the side of not watering enough. It’s much more common to get root rot from watering too much than to have problems from allowing the plant to dry out a bit. Drought for a lot of plants is okay, so if you’re on the fence, wait another day or so.

With Henry, I checked him just a couple of days ago, and he was still moist, but now I’m going to put in the moisture meter. You want to use a moisture meter in several areas. He is in the three, so he is showing dry there too. I can take a peek; yep, it’s dry—actually between two and three. But it’s better to do that than to water when he was still a little bit moist.

Other ways to check include using wooden skewers. This is a really inexpensive way to check the soil moisture. What happens is that when you stick this in, if there is very little to no soil on the skewer, or it falls off very easily, that tells you that the soil inside the pot is dry. You can do it as you would with the moisture meter—in several locations. There is nothing sticking on this wooden skewer. However, I’ll show you the difference here with this beautiful Dracaena that I recently watered. When I stick the wooden skewer in and pull it out, you can see there’s soil stuck to the wooden skewer. It’s wet soil; usually, dry soil won’t stick.

Another method is the pick-up test. If you pick up the plant and it feels lightweight, then it is time to water it. This works best on plants that are not in terracotta or glazed ceramic pots because those tend to retain moisture. However, once I water him, he will be heavier because we’re adding some bulk with the water. It’s very easy to determine with plastic pots. Right now, when I’m picking this Dracaena up, she is heavy. When she is ready for watering, she is going to be much more lightweight.

Another way to check if your plants need watering is if they are flagging. Flagging is when you glance at your plant and notice it looks a little droopy; it’s not exactly droopy yet, but it appears slightly drooped and the sheen on the leaves looks dull. This is a common sign with some plants, like pothos, but it can happen with all plants. You may be passing by and think, “What’s going on with that plant?” That’s flagging, and it is another sign that the plant is saying it’s time to water. The flagging usually precedes drooping by a day or two; you don’t want to get to that point.

Lastly, there’s the finger test, which isn’t as useful as some of the other methods. You often read about this technique, where you put your finger in the soil up to your knuckle. It’s very hard to put your finger in up to your first knuckle. I usually just stick it in a little bit to the first joint, pull it out, and if soil is stuck on my finger, then the soil is definitely wet. If I stick my hand into Henry’s pot, it is dry down there, so he is definitely ready for a really good watering.

Those are some good ways to check and see if your plants need watering. As I mentioned, using more than one method is a really good way to be sure and have a lesser chance of overwatering your plants.

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