This is the Houseplant tip I get asked about most. What do you do when a plant is going downhill and you can’t tell why?

The mistake almost everyone makes is to jump straight to the symptom. Yellow leaf, so it must be overwatering. Brown tips, so it must be humidity. Drooping, so it must be thirsty. Each of those is sometimes right and often wrong, because the same symptom can be caused by half a dozen completely different things.

So before you do anything else — before you fertilise, before you repot, before you move the plant somewhere new — you slow down.

There’s an order I use, and I teach it inside Houseplant Mastery in full detail. The short version is this: most chronic plant problems come back to three things, and they need to be checked in a specific order. Going in the wrong order is how people end up making things worse. They water a plant that’s struggling with light. They fertilise a plant that’s actually got root rot. They repot a plant that just needed a brighter spot.

The full framework — the four steps I run through every time, with the specific things to look for at each one — is inside the “What to do when things go wrong” module of Houseplant Mastery. That module also covers the proper root rot protocol and how to contain a pest outbreak before it takes out your whole collection.

The bit I’ll give you today, because it’s the one most people miss: nine times out of ten, the answer isn’t pests, isn’t disease, isn’t anything exotic. It’s one of three things. And the order you check them in matters more than people realise.

​Houseplant Mastery is currently 50% off, doors close Sunday night, and there’s a 7-day money-back guarantee. If you get inside and it’s not for you, just tell me and I’ll refund you. No awkwardness.

Rich