Newsletter Articles
How to Feed and Water Popular SoCal Indoor and Outdoor Plants
Written by Kelsey W.
Caring for your plants and helping them thrive means feeding and watering them at the right times, rates, and amounts. Some plants are quite forgiving and don’t need a very specific care schedule, but you can still maximize their happiness by learning about what sort of feeding and watering schedule those plants like best.
You can also make the attention you pay your plants more impactful by watering them and feeding them in specific ways. At a really simple level, all you really need is a watering can and some liquid fertilizer drops, and you can technically feed and water almost any plant successfully.
However, there are some habits you can adopt to make the overall process more efficient, more effective, and better for creating happy, long-lived plants. Not only will your plants thrive, but they’ll reward you by looking their best.
Let’s learn about the finer points of feeding and watering some of the most popular plants grown by residents across Southern California.
How Much Water Do SoCal Plants Really Need?
It’s quite common for novice plant owners to make one of two mistakes in watering plants: they either forget to water their plants or they water them way too much. Both mistakes can lead to very unhappy plants, but it’s actually the over-watering that will usually lead to a quicker death.
Just about all plants that grow natively in Southern California, as well as most that grow well in the climate, do not like sitting in soggy soil, and they’ll start to turn yellow and rot when you water them too often. So, remember, even if you’re growing a tropical plant like a hibiscus, that plant doesn’t want water every day unless it’s over 100 degrees outside and the humidity is below 15 percent.
In other words, unless the weather gets extraordinarily dry and the heat gets well above the average (unless you’re in the desert, of course), you don’t need to water plants every day, even in Southern California. Even in harsh conditions with plants that need above-average water, you can wait a few days between each visit with the watering can.
Let’s explore some popular SoCal flowering plants and their watering schedules:
- California Poppy: Water every few days until they’re established, but let the soil dry out otherwise. You can easily wait a week and a half to water California poppies, and it’s always a good idea to pay attention to any upcoming rain and schedule your watering schedule accordingly.
- Cosmos: Colorful cosmos likes its soil to dry out between waterings, just like the poppy. They hate a lot of water and can easily rot if given too much. You’ll know if you’re watering too much if their stems weaken and they start to fall over.
- Snapdragons: These plants like a little more water than average but can go about a week without water once they’re established, as long as you give them a nice amount each week. The potted variety can get a little dry, so they sometimes need more frequent watering, about twice a week.
- Lupine: You can actually water lupine once a week, even when they’re getting established, and then they only need water when there’s no rain for long stretches of time. A good, long drink once a week is completely sufficient, but watering even less often is fine if their soil isn’t too dry in between.
- Yarrow: If you put a young yarrow plant in your yard, you should water it about once a week for the first year. Once it’s gotten used to its surroundings, however, you can almost forget about the watering unless there’s a particularly long dry spell. They’re actually more susceptible to over-watering than under.
Watering Basics: Maximizing Water in Drought Conditions
Saving water is a practice just about everyone should strive for in Southern California, but it’s actually really easy to reduce how much water you use for your plants by watering them early in the morning and at no other time of the day.
If you water a plant in the middle of the day, a lot of the water won’t even go toward hydrating the plant. Instead, the water will just evaporate and disappear into the air. Similarly, if you water the plant in the evening, the plant might not get to maximize its use of the water during the next day.
If you’re not a morning person and rising with the sun (or before it) sounds like the worst thing ever, you might be a good candidate for a visit with a landscaper who can build a drip-line for you or install a sprinkler that you can set on an early morning timer.
Remember That Pots are Different
A last note about watering schedules: you’ll need to treat plants in pots differently because they tend to dry out more quickly (as long as their pot has drainage) than plants in the ground. Always check the moisture level of the soil after you put a new plant in a pot, so you can gauge your watering schedule correctly.
Making Fertilizer Application Easy for SoCal Plants
Fertilizer might sound complicated because it’s made up of chemicals that you probably haven’t thought about since high school, unless you interact with them at work, but fertilizer is actually a pretty simple concept with rather simple rules.
Here are some basics to remember to make your fertilizing more successful:
- Water with fertilizer: You’ll want to water directly before and after you fertilize to avoid root burn, but don’t drench the plant unless it actually needs full watering.
- Read the directions: Different fertilizers require different applications. A liquid fertilizer added to water would be applied in a different manner from a granular fertilizer applied directly to the soil.
- Apply the fertilizer in the spring: The springtime is the best time to fertilize, as most plants tend to start growing at this time. Most plants don’t need fertilization in the winter when they slow their growth.
- Don’t over-fertilize: Just like water, giving a plant too much fertilizer is just as bad. It’s much better to forget to fertilize than to give the plant too much food.
- Look at the forecast: Try to avoid fertilizing right before heavy rain because all the rain will wash the newly applied fertilizer away from the plant before it has a chance to absorb.
Do You Need to Test Your Soil?
In addition to understanding what type of fertilizer your plant might enjoy, you can also test your soil to determine whether you even need to fertilize. Well-tended soil and composted soil don’t always need fertilizer, and you may only need to add some in the spring when new plant growth begins.
You can test soil with a little device that reads the chemical makeup of the soil, which can help you figure out if you really need to up the nitrogen content on your leafy greens or boost the phosphorus for your flowers.
Do You Need to Know Chemicals to Apply Fertilizer?
There are just three chemicals in standard fertilizer, and different plants usually enjoy different amounts of each chemical. When you look at the bottle or container, you’ll see some numbers that tell you how much nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are in the mixture.
If you’re trying to make your flowers grow, you’ll probably notice the mixture has higher phosphorus than the other components. If you’re growing a vegetable garden, you’ll probably need to select a fertilizer with high nitrogen, since the chemical helps grow big green leaves.
However, you shouldn’t feel like you absolutely need to fertilize your plants, and especially not all year long. If anything, making an appointment to start the spring with some fertilizing should be sufficient for most plants, and you shouldn’t need to worry about feeding the rest of the year.
Let Green Thumb Nursery Help Start Your Beautiful Flower Garden
Are you thinking about bringing some flowers home and starting a garden? There’s no better place in Southern California than Green Thumb Nursery to learn all about the beautiful flowers and plants that will beautify your home, condo, apartment, or abode. Stop by a Southern California location today to get started on your next gardening project and for advice on growing happy and healthy plants.
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