What I'd tell past-me about houseplants

They have much less risk of overwatering, due to multiple factors:

• The walls breathe
• The conic shape means there is less dirt at the bottom to get waterlogged
• The drain hole gets rid of the excess

That matters because watering should be dead easy, especially when you have to travel and let someone else water your plants for a while.

If I cannot have this, I must have a glass pot so I can see how much water is inside.

Re. the pot-and-plate method. Big plates let you water plants "from the bottom up": you fill the plate with water and let it be sucked up into the soil. Watering this way 3 weeks out of 4 keeps the topsoil dry most of the time, which discourages gnats (fruit fly-like pests).

When you water top-down,

• It carries soil out into the plate, making the standing water more dirty and contributing to plaque buildup on the outside of the pot. Always water bottoms-up and there should be less of this type of plaque.

When you commit to watering bottom-up,

• any decorations you put on the topsoil will stay clean. so you can:
  • add water-vulnerable decorations, like paper artworks
  • style it like a Japanese stone garden
  • etc

Give it a good deep pot. In a shallow pot, it ends up splaying rather than standing straight up.

If you want window plants, this plant is one of the best, because it doesn't twist its prettiest side to face the window. It also handles rough transportation without any trouble, good if you move often. Spiderplants break apart if you so much as look at them.

The vines can be fragile. Specifically, when you have a side shoot growing out of another vine, that side shoot is forever at risk of snapping off, even if it's grown to a healthy 8-meter beast. The connection to the parent stem is still so weak that a flick of your finger can be its end. In nature, this is fine because the vine is supposed to be securely wrapped around a tree trunk or some such, so jostling a part of it will not jostle the entire vine.

For a pothos in the home, it's nice if the main stem(s) are be responsible for most of the plant mass. If you have side-shoots near the base, bury the base in a lot more dirt. The dirt will keep things from jostling and breaking. If this is not realistic, stick the vine's tip into a new pot where it will start over more strongly. Bury the tip deep!

Or find some kind of safe sealant to strengthen where the side shoot branches off from the parent stem.

Unless you like the weeds look, don't get these. It can be very pretty if a single spiderplant grows in the middle of a pot and has not been jostled or touched since birth, but as soon as someone touches it or looks at it wrong, leaves start bending and breaking and now it looks like weeds.

If you must use an opaque pot lacking drainage… do it right. It's hard to improve later.

Rig a water reservoir in the bottom and install a watering tube.

((If you don't want to bother, a good minimum is to stick a pipe through the dirt, so you can pull it out and make a proper watering pipe at some point in the future.))

It's easier than you think. Ingredients:

• a wine cork
• a plastic pipe
• some steel wire
• expanded clay balls (or round balls of any kind)
• some old nylon or polyester clothing you can cut up

Put the pipe in the pot, making it stand perfectly vertical.

Cut the cork down to something that will fit inside the tube.

Stick a steel wire into the cork. Drop the cork into the tube so it hits the floor. Don't cut the wire just yet.

Fill the pot up with a few centimeters of clay balls. Then add water until it matches the same level.

At this point the cork will be floating in water. Now cut the steel wire at the exact point it exits the tube. That's your marker! That's how you see that the reservoir is full.

Put down some nylon or polyester like a mat over the reservoir, blocking roots from growing down into it. If you can, seal tightly around the tube and also line the walls, but don't be a perfectionist… it's just a plant.

I prefer pots with drain holes or glass pots, it sidesteps all this work.

Check it at the shop. Undersides of leaves, etc.

Bring it into the house in a plastic bag. Wash yourself since you've been at a greenhouse.

Quarantine the new plant for 40 days. If you don't have an extra room, you can put a plastic bag over the pot.

• Water bottoms-up
• Quarantine new plants
• Quarantine sick plants
• use insecticide as needed
• use soapy water and rinse
• use clean pots & clean soil (sterilize it yourself). Consider non-soil potting mediums too.