How to keep your house plants alive

Confession time. Do you believe you are a brown-thumbed gardener, liable to kill your houseplants within a year? Welcome to the club, a club that houses 99.99 per cent of humans.

- JACKIE FRENCH

Plants do not naturally grow indoors, apart from some mushrooms and the mould on your stale sandwiches. This means that almost every house plant you buy has been chosen or bred to sell to people who have no idea how to keep a plant happy. 

Yes, a few expensive ones are sold in the expectation that they will cark it and you'll be back to buy another, but most garden centre people know that once you discourage a gardener, they stop buying. House plants are tough.

Cacti and other succulents 

Don't worry about over-watering, except in very humid climates. Don't put cacti in your steamy bathroom, either. Cacti like it dry. Just make sure they are well drained and not sitting in a saucer of water. Water when you remember, and when the soil is dry. If you water weekly and feed weakly, about a quarter of what it says on the packet, and only when growing strongly, they may slowly grow massive, and even bloom. Or not. Many pot plants quite happily exist neither growing nor dying.

Ferns

Most ferns are killed by too much care. Don't feed your ferns you will kill off the invisible new shoots, and they will die as the old fronds die off and nothing will replace them. Just water. If they are wilting, water now.

Pot plant with leaves

Your average leafy pot plant will tell you what it needs. Leaves growing towards the window? It needs more light. Growing straggly? It needs light.