Plant Care Tracker Printable, Houseplant Watering Log PDF

PLANT CARE TRACKER - PRINTABLE
15-page PDF. Instant download. For houseplants and garden plants.

Overwatering kills more houseplants than every pest and disease combined, and it does it by disguising itself.

A plant in waterlogged soil cannot take up water. The roots suffocate, and the leaves droop. The plant looks thirsty. The instinct is to water it. That is the one thing guaranteed to finish it off.

THE IDEA THIS TRACKER IS BUILT ON

Check on a schedule. Water on demand.

The schedule is for you, because you will otherwise forget the plant exists until it is desperate. The decision is for the plant, made with a finger in the soil. Most care routines collapse those into one thing, and that is why "water every Sunday" kills plants - it is a rule about the calendar, and a plant's water use depends on light, temperature, pot size and season, all of which change.

So this tracker has a column for when you CHECKED and a separate column for whether you watered. They are deliberately different columns.

WHAT IS INSIDE

- How to check: four methods, and what each actually tells you
- The overwatering signs that look like underwatering, side by side
- Six plant cards: conditions, care baseline, a 14-row watering log, and history
- A whole-collection page with twelve month columns, for carrying round with a watering can
- Feeding record
- Repotting record - the interval matters more than the date
- Problem log: describe first, diagnose second
- An away-from-home page to hand to whoever is plant-sitting

DELIBERATELY NOT INCLUDED

A database of per-species care instructions. Care sheets that say a plant wants water "once a week" are the reason so many houseplants die. After two months of your own records you will have a better care sheet than anything you could buy.

WHO MADE IT

Alex Purdy, Carolina Terrain, Waxhaw NC. NC Landscape Contractor License CL.1872.

A record-keeping tool, not horticultural advice for a specific plant or site. Not prepared by a Professional Engineer or a Registered Landscape Architect.

FORMAT

PDF, US Letter, 15 pages, undated. Print one card per plant and as many log pages as you need.

For personal use. Please do not resell or redistribute the file.