What's going on everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. I am Kevin and we are

joined again by Darrell Chang of House Plant Journal. He is the author of the newly released book, The New Plant Parent, which is just a fantastic

primer on a new way to think about how to care for your indoor plants.

Or perhaps, I guess you could say say a return to the old way to think

about how to care for plants in general. Today we talked a little bit about

light in the prior episodes today we're going to be talking about probably one of the most common things that I think people think they do to their plants which would be overwatering and

Darrell I know you have a lot to say about this so I'm just actually going to let you go free.

Okay, so there's several parts but I think the very first thing I will I will say is that when we hear the term over watering, if we hear the term over and then

anything like it as a as a prefix to a word you know it can mean that it's too that can mean that the thing is too

intense right or that the thing has been done too many times, right?

And so right away there's that ambiguity.

Then if we read the traditional plant care advice,

what they usually mean when they say overwatering, it

means when you just blindly water the plant without checking its soil, right? And therefore they're trying to say

that it's talking about the frequency. So the issue with that is that, well at least the issue I have with it, is that the term overwatering

misleads people into believing that, oh, therefore the solution is to quote

unquote correctly water or just don't water too much but that doesn't really get at the heart of the issue which is root rot right like they're usually when we say when we warn about not watering too much, we're trying to say you don't want the plant to rot.

But the thing is, root rot is sort of like, you know, catching a cold.

Like the moment you walk outside if it's a little bit chilly,

you're not like guaranteed to catch a cold.

Like it would have to be that, oh know your immune systems a week maybe you were

fatigue you haven't had enough sleep your malnourous then you're more susceptible to

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