A guy at a nursery in Boise told me to stop watering my snake plant on a schedule, and I argued with him for 10 minutes
He said to stick my finger two inches down and only water when it's bone dry, and after losing two plants to root rot I finally tried it on my 4-year-old snake plant and it threw out a new leaf for the first time since 2020, so now I'm wondering what other plant advice I've been ignoring because I thought I knew better.
Oh man, the finger test thing is so real and it goes way past watering. I do the same thing with light now, like I used to just park plants wherever they looked cute and wonder why they got leggy and sad, and once I started actually checking which way my windows face and how far the light reaches, everything changed. The nursery people are usually right and it bugs me how long it took to admit that. You should try the same "check first, act later" thing with fertilizer too, because I was feeding mine on a schedule like it was a chore and it was actually making things worse half the time. Maybe the real lesson is that plants don't care about our calendars at all, they just want us to pay attention.