Pests & Problems

Two answers cover the overwhelming majority of stalled Pothos: light and pests. Almost nobody starts there. Everyone starts with watering, because watering is the lever we all know we’re pulling, and because it’s the one thing you actively do to a plant. So people adjust their watering, wait, adjust it again, and six months later … Read more

Yes. A Pothos with root rot is almost never past saving, because even if every root is gone, the vine above it will grow new ones. You can lose the entire root system and still end up with a plant. Why Pothos get root rot so often Not because they’re prone to it. Pothos are … Read more

Search this and every result will tell you the same thing: fungal or bacterial leaf spot. I’ve been doing this a long time and that is almost never my first thought. When I see black spots on a Pothos, I assume roots or pests until something tells me otherwise, and most of the time I’m … Read more

Brown leaves mean about eleven different things, which is why every article you’ve read on this has given you a list of causes and left you no closer to knowing which one is yours. So this isn’t a list. It’s a process of elimination. Here’s the thing nobody tells beginners: reading a plant from its … Read more

You will see the damage long before you see the animal. Spider mites are about half a millimetre long, which is to say they are a dot. Not a small insect. A dot. You can be looking directly at a colony of them and register nothing except that the leaf seems a bit dusty. They’re … Read more

I hate scale. Not in a measured, professional, this-pest-presents-certain-challenges way. I mean I find them gross. It’s the pattern they make: dozens of identical little domes in neat rows along a stem, evenly spaced, all facing the same way. Something about clusters of small round bumps makes a lot of people’s skin crawl, and if … Read more

Good news: aphids are the least of your Pothos worries. Thrips will hunt this plant down. Mealybugs will take it if nothing better is going. Aphids, on the other hand, would really rather be somewhere else, and if you keep your Pothos indoors you may never meet them at all. The catch is that aphids … Read more

You’ve found white fluff in the joint where a leaf meets the stem, and it wasn’t there last week. That’s mealybugs, and I’ll start with the reassuring bit: your Pothos is not their first choice. Mealybugs want something soft and juicy. They want a Crassula. They want a Hoya. A Pothos is a bit tough … Read more

Of all the pests in this silo, thrips are the one that will actually come for your Pothos. Mealybugs would rather be on a Hoya. Aphids prefer something soft. Scale mostly bothers Monstera and palm owners. Thrips are interested in everything, they live outdoors in numbers that would ruin your day if you thought about … Read more

Here’s a framing I want you to try, and I promise it’s less depressing than it sounds: assume your Pothos has pests. Right now. All of them, probably. Not because it definitely does. But because the alternative framing, the one where you assume your plant is clean until proven otherwise, is how people end up … Read more