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Hot take: my neighbor in Tucson said to quit watering my ficus on a schedule and just stick my finger in the dirt first
She has kept a 6 foot fiddle leaf alive for 9 years in a room that gets maybe two hours of direct sun, so I figured she knew something. Her rule was simple: push a finger down to the second knuckle and if it comes up dry, soak it, if not, walk away. I had been giving mine about a cup of water each Sunday for two years and it kept dropping leaves on me. After six weeks of the finger test it pushed out four new leaves, and I never once touched a moisture meter. Turns out the top inch of soil dries way faster than the root ball, so my old plan was basically drowning the bottom half. Do you all go by feel, or is there a cheap tool that actually gets the deeper reading right?
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joelthomas7d ago
Man, the thing nobody brings up is what kind of pot it's in. A finger test in a glazed ceramic pot tells you one story, but in an unglazed terra cotta pot the whole thing breathes through the sides and dries out way faster than you would guess from just poking the top. Same plant, same soil, two totally different watering needs just based on the pot. That is probably why your Sunday cup was killing it while your neighbor's routine works fine. She is not just checking the soil, she is reading the whole setup. So yeah, finger test all day, but pay attention to the pot too.
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