A few gardening wins to celebrate:

This fiddle leaf we inherited from friends leaving california came to us with a three braided trunks and a healthy tight dome of branches and leaves. It grew and grew and grew and then one day a few years later with consistent care, seemed to have exhausted the soil and dropped nearly every leaf.

Heartbreaking.

I pruned a lot of the branches back to the trunk, including one of the three all the way down to nothing but a dead stump. Or so I thought.

Camera phone shot of a potted fiddle leave ficus tree about 4 feet tall with three trunks braided a few feet up. One of the trunks ends in a trimmed of stump, the other two are also trimmed off stumps but have branches extending a foot or two that terminate in normal fiddle leaf clusters. When healthy, this tree had a dozen such branches with deep leaf coverage, but as with these finicky trees, at least in my care, that didn’t last. Near the bottom, just above the soil line, two new branches are emerging from the stump! Eureka!

camera phone top down view of the stump branch and trade. The new growth is in the bottom of the frame and out of focus.

camera shot close up of two new branches, each with leaf clusters. the leaves are about a quarter of their eventual full size, say thumb sized, but already in rings of three or five and growing strong right out of the trunk.

We also had a monstera that was just out of control so we split it off to a new pot and left nothing but a stump of the repotted original.

It returned strongly and that was how we learned that new growth leaves don’t have the characteristic finger-length fringe that mature growth has. Neat!

top down view of a potted monstera plant with five large leaves. the older ones are fingered while the newer ones are much less so.
close up of new growth growing next to the mature 2” diameter stump which also has new growth emerging from it. A single tiny palm sized leaf faces the camera and has almost no fringe.

A worker at the garden center we go to took one look at picuters of our struggle before this and explained that house plants are generally ground growth in forests and prefer shade.

Well I’d been blasting ours with direct sunlight, which explains the scorched leaves I worried about but had no idea how to fix. We have shears in the windows, so now we use them.

I also think that plants know seasons by day length and temperature so I stopped closing the curtains at night and open the ones I do close as early as possible so that they get the maximum duration of daylight, first through shears and then in “direct” shadow. Seems to help?

I think I need to tackle soil chemicals and fertilizer next and don’t really know where to start.

Feeling emboldened with a pair of gardening shears, I took about 2/3rds of the height off of our stalky, spindly rubber plant and put the strongest bit in some water for two months, which I changed whenever I watered the rest of the plants.

As foretold by people who know, the bit in the water started to root so I planted it. Meanwhile the now-shorter planted plant began to bush out like I wanted it to. Huzzah!

photograph of a 2 foot tall potted rubber plant with a bunch of new growth ending in red tips which will unfurl to leaves and branches Next to this older bush is the top of it which I trimmed and rooted in water before recently replanting.

None of these are, I think, difficult to care for plants in California, and this thread is very much "area man follows basic advice after 20 years of repeatedly disregarded exposure.” Alas and nevertheless.

In the mastodon collection:

Mastodon post from July 18, 2026, 116941393171325327 →

In the general collection:

Slide Ranch camping weekend →