The Plant Tender blog

Notes on building the app, keeping plants alive, and reading a meter for what it's actually telling you.

How to Get Rid of Fungus Gnats in Houseplants

The first time I noticed them, I was drinking coffee at my kitchen table and a tiny black speck lifted off the soil of my pothos and did a lazy loop past my face. I swatted it away and didn't think much of it. Then I noticed another one rising off the peace lily next to it. Then one more, drunk-flying out of the soil of a plant I hadn't even looked at in a week. By the end of that morning I'd counted six of them in a five-foot radius, and I was googling "how to get rid of fungus gnats in houseplants" with the specific dread of someone who thinks their whole indoor jungle is about to become a bug farm.

How Often to Water Snake Plant: The Real Answer (Not 'Once a Month')

My snake plant lived on top of a bookshelf in the darkest corner of my old apartment, and for about a year I watered it on the first of every month, right after I paid rent. It felt organized. Responsible, even. I had a rule, and rules feel like competence when you're new to plants.

How to Save an Overwatered Plant

The peace lily told on itself before I even touched the soil. Every leaf was down — not the dramatic, theatrical droop it does right before I water it, but a duller, heavier sag, like the whole plant had given up holding its own arms up. The bottom three leaves had gone yellow at the same time, which felt like too much of a coincidence to be random.

When to repot houseplants

The real answer is: repot when the soil's behavior changes, not when spring arrives. A plant tells you it's outgrown its pot by drying out much faster than it used to, or it tells you something's wrong at the roots by staying wet for days after a watering. Both are soil signals, not calendar signals, and they're a lot more reliable than "it's been a year, I should probably repot this."

How to Fix Root Rot in a Houseplant

The fix is surgical, not magical: unpot the plant, cut away every root that's brown and mushy, repot in fresh dry mix, and change whatever watering habit got the soil that wet in the first place. There's no product you spray on to reverse root rot — you have to physically remove the dead tissue before it takes the rest of the plant with it. Here's how to do that without overcorrecting or panicking and tossing a plant that's actually salvageable.

Why I Built Plant-Tender

I killed a lot of plants before I built this.