Gauging Soil Moisture

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Blooming, Care and Culture, Growing Indoors, Growing Outdoors

The most common way to check the moisture level in plant containers is to wiggle your finger into the soil, up to the first knuckle, and decide if the soil feels moist about an inch below the surface.

Even professionals use this method, along with other low-tech tricks such as tipping the pot to see if it feels heavy or light. But the finger method has its limitations. You can’t tell how much moisture is present deep in the container, and you know nothing about the most difficult area to water, the center of the plant’s root mass. To find out how much water is present in those areas, you can use a probe or meter (which are not always reliable) or assess the container’s weight.

There is always some guesswork involved in plant watering, but the finger method combined with regular weight checks should get you started in the right direction. Of course, the most important thing is to pay attention to your plants. Either under-watering or over-watering can cause a plant to droop, as can incomplete watering, in which only part of the root mass receives moisture. To prevent this problem, learn to water your plants from both the top and the bottom!