Depending on the plant type and sunlight level, indoor plants must be rotated frequently. Some plants need to be rotated more than others. If you’re a Pothos plants fan, you may wonder how often you should rotate them.
You should rotate indoor Pothos at least once or twice a week to ensure the whole plant gets the light it needs. Rotating your Pothos is crucial to its growth.
This article will discuss how to rotate your pothos plant correctly and why it’s essential, along with some signs of too little or too much sun exposure and other care tips regarding indoor Pothos.
Rotating Your Pothos Plant
If a plant requires a lot of light, you don’t have to rotate them as much. However, for a Pothos plant that requires low light, you’ll need to rotate it more often than you’d think—rotating it at least once a week, if not twice, will do wonders for your pothos.
Rotating your Pothos will ensure equal growth and healthiness throughout the whole plant. Pothos need to be watered once a week or every two weeks, depending on how dry the soil gets between waterings and the season. An excellent suggestion by Plant Legend is if you find your pothos needs to be watered once a week, a perfect way to ensure you’re giving it the care it needs is to rotate the plant when you water it.
If you don’t rotate your Pothos correctly, this could do a lot of damage to your plant. Not rotating your Pothos can result in leaning, plant sunburn, and drooping leaves. Rotating your Pothos is essential so that none of these things occur.
Not rotating your Pothos can also cause the soil to dry out more on one side than the other. You don’t want this because if you water it, one side needs it, and the other will get too much. Therefore, you could start to get root rot which can kill your plant.
For more detailed information regarding rotating your indoor plants, refer to this article: How Often Should You Rotate Indoor House Plants
Leaning Pothos
If you’ve found that your Pothos is leaning, this could be because one side is receiving more sunlight than the other. Therefore, your rotation schedule isn’t right. To fix this, you’ll want to rotate your Pothos more often than you have been to get the same amount of growth on the non-leaning side.
You can also add more soil to the leaning side to straighten it up a bit more. Too much leaning and the stems of your Pothos could start to break and eventually fall off. Sometimes you can even add small wooden stents to the stems to keep them straight until the other side grows evenly.
Sunburned or Drooping Pothos Leaves
Pothos plants can get what is called a “plant sunburn.” These are black spots on leaves that have been facing the sun for too long. So, if you don’t rotate your pothos, you may notice black spots. You’ll want to rotate your pothos immediately.
Once leaves are sunburned, they won’t return to their standard color. The best thing to do is to cut off the affected leaves and make sure you keep an eye on how much sun your Pothos is getting.
Suppose you rotate it on a consistent schedule and find it isn’t working. In that case, you may want to move the plant farther away from where the sunlight is coming in. There may be too much light in general, causing your pothos to get sunburnt no matter the rotation.
If your Pothos leaves become droopy and more yellow than green, this can signify low light. If you notice this on the side of the plant facing away from the sun, you’ll want to rotate it the other way so it can receive more sunlight.
An increase in sunlight should fix the drooping; the leaves will eventually perk back up. However, once leaves start to turn yellow, they won’t go back to green, so there is nothing you can do to fix that. Moving it to receive more sunlight will prevent it from further turning yellow, though. There’s no need to remove the yellowed leaves, and the changing color won’t harm the rest of the plant.
Basic Care for an Indoor Pothos Plant
Some plants have specific care instructions for them to stay at their healthiest. These plants are relatively easy to care for, but there are a few tips to keep them living the longest and looking beautiful. With a good watering schedule and correct rotation, your Pothos will surely be their healthiest.
Watering
The Pothos plant needs a different watering schedule depending on the season. It all depends on if your Pothos is blooming and how quickly the soil is drying out due to the environment.
- Winter Months: You’ll want to water your pothos the least during these months. Every 10 – 14 days should be a good guideline. To ensure this is a reasonable time frame for your Pothos, you can do the soil test to see how dry or moist the soil is and gauge it from that. In the winter, Pothos doesn’t grow, and the soil usually doesn’t dry out quickly.
- Spring Months: In the springtime, you’ll want to increase how often you water your pothos. Even though the Pothos doesn’t bloom until around May, they need to be watered more in the spring months to help grow. Springtime may have you watering the plant almost weekly.
- Summer Months: When summer comes around, the heat can be brutal, which means the soil will dry out much quicker. During these hot months, you’ll most likely need to water your pothos twice a week to keep the soil healthy and saturated enough to provide enough nutrients for your indoor Pothos.
- Fall Months: In the fall, you can start to cut back on the heavy watering you were doing in the summer and go back to a schedule similar to the spring months. Growth slows down, and the soil doesn’t dry out as fast unless you live in an area where the fall months are still relatively hot, like the summer months.
Best Placement for a Pothos Plant in Your Home
Different windows in your home provide various types of direct light. The best kind of window for your indoor pothos will be an east-facing window. According to Garden for Indoor, an east-facing window provides direct sunlight in the morning and bright indirect light for the remainder of the day. This direct and indirect light is excellent for a pothos plant that needs low light.
If you were to keep your Pothos in the south and west-facing window, the amount of direct light at all hours of the day would be too intense. This amount of light could cause sunburn and other issues on your Pothos.
When placing your Pothos near a window, you don’t want to put them directly on the windowsill or in front of it. Doing so can be too much light exposure to your Pothos plant. For the perfect placement, you’ll want to keep it near enough to the window to receive the necessary light, about two to three feet away from it.
You might have to play around with placement and rotation until you get the perfect setup in your home. It depends on your home, the window size, the light coming in, and the level your house or apartment is on. Just keep an eye on your Pothos plant to ensure it’s healthy, and if so, then you’re doing everything right. Keep up the excellent work!
Conclusion
For the healthiest Pothos plant, you’ll want to rotate it once or twice a week. Rotation is crucial to a Pothos’ health and growth. You’ll need to keep an eye out for sunburned, browning leaves or leaning in your Pothos. These signs mean that your rotation schedule could be wrong.
East-facing windows are the best placement for your indoor Pothos. You’ll also want to place your pothos two to three feet (61 to 91.4 centimeters) away from the window.
If you’d like to learn more on how often to rotate houseplants, you could check this article out: How Often Should You Rotate Indoor House Plants?
