How To Put Your Plant On Life Support

Would you believe me if I said this pitcher plant was “dead” a week ago?

So your plant is dying. Or maybe you believe that it’s “dead.” The truth is, a lot more plants can be saved than get thrown out for turning dry and brown. Let’s address first things first: plants will not always look beautiful, fluffy, and glossy like they did when you brought them home from the nursery. Nurseries carefully cultivate the ultimate plant growing atmosphere with high light and humidity, and they stress the plant into producing the most foliage in the least time for sale. In your home or in the wild, they’re going to go through more realistic life stages. Tips of leaves may brown, lower leaves will yellow and die off as the plant grows... all of this is totally normal. It’s important to learn to love your plant even when it doesn’t look 100% perfect.

That said, sometimes our plants have an especially hard time. They drop most of their leaves, they droop, they dry right up and shrivel, or they stop growing and look peaky. But it may not be too late to save your plant! There are a few things you can try before you relegate it to the trash.

1) Cut off all yellowed or crispy brown leaves and parts of leaves. Your plant is expending an awful lot of energy trying to keep these leaves growing. Cutting off dying leaves frees the plant up to put more energy into living leaves and growing new leaves. It’s ok to cut half of a leaf off, too. The green part of the leaf will continue to produce chlorophyll your plant will use to grow strong. If this means cutting off all of your leaves and leaving an ugly stem, so be it. More leaves will probably come!

2) If your plant is growing a lot of stem and no leaves, it needs more sun. This is called getting “leggy,” and it happens when your plant is traveling to look for more light. It won’t spend precious energy growing leaves when there’s no sun to make food with, so the stem or vine will grow longer and longer... and look sparse and ugly. Give your plant a helping hand by trimming off the leggy vine or branch and moving the plant to a spot with more light. You might even be able to trim up the stem and propagate your plant! Your plant should thank you by getting a little bushier and may even put out more vines or branches to replace the missing one!

3) If your once-happy plant stops growing or starts to look a little sad, it probably wants to be repotted. Plants sometimes fill up their whole pot with roots, and this is called getting pot-bound. When you remove your plant from its pot, gently untangle as many roots as you can and free as much dirt from them as possible. This will encourage them to spread out and not knot up so much in their new pot. More succulent plants will want to wait a few days to heal before being watered in their new pots.

This photo courtesy of someone on Reddit

4) Sometimes pests are killing our plants. Small white dots or spots of white fuzz indicate Mealybugs, which will grow when your more succulent plants are very dry and hot. They nibble on succulent leaves. They can be killed by dabbing them with a q-tip dipped in alcohol, which shouldn’t hurt your plant too badly. Make sure you get all the bugs and their eggs before putting your plant back with the others! Gnats flying around your plant are laying eggs in the dirt your plant lives in, and the babies feed on tender roots. Repotting with new soil and washing the roots to totally get rid of eggs should take care of that problem. There are other pests as well that you can look up online that may be tormenting your poor plant baby! 

5) In the fall and winter the air is quite dry. A lot of indoor plants are tropical and crave humidity to keep their leaves plump. You can save your tropical plants by sitting them under the stream of a humidifier. After trimming off all the dried sad leaves, pop it under a humidifier and see if it comes back to life! Remember, cactuses and many succulents come from the desert and need heat but not so much humidity.

The moral of the story is that most plants can be rescued from near death and brought back with a little patience and care. Many plants go through ugly phases every fall and winter and THIS IS NORMAL! Plants need to die back, just like deciduous trees, and take a breather to conserve their energy for the growing season. Don’t expect them to be creating new growth year round, and they won’t expect you to constantly come up with genius new blog posts year round either :)