Watering is always a complicated task: if you water little, the plants quickly dry up and die, and if you water a lot, the fungi infect them and can kill them. Finding the middle point is difficult during the warm months, but in autumn and winter it is even more so since in many parts of the world it is when it rains the most.
To avoid that your pots have problems during the coldest months of the year, next we will tell you how to water plants in winter.
Check the humidity of the substrate
Before watering it is very important that we make sure that the substrate is not damp, since otherwise we would end up giving our plant more water than it needs, suffocating its roots. To do this, we can do several things:
- Introduce a thin wooden stick (like the ones the Japanese use to eat) in the pot: if when you extract it it comes out with little adhering substrate, it will mean that it is dry.
- Using a digital moisture meter: you just have to put it in the pot and we will immediately see how wet it is. To be more effective, we recommend introducing it at different points, since it may happen that the soil that is closer to the main stem is more humid than the one that is closer to the walls of the pot.
- Weigh the pot once watered and again after a few days: a freshly watered plant will always weigh more than one with a dry substrate. Writing down or memorizing the weight it has on each of the two occasions will help us to know when to water.
Stay tuned for the weather forecasts
This is very necessary if we have plants outside. If we water for example on Monday and it turns out that it rains from Tuesday several days in a row, there will be plants -such as succulents- that may not feel too good for them. In addition, avoid putting a plate under them, and make sure the substrate has good sewer system.
This way your little plants will bear the winter better 🙂.