Hi Cassidi, Your money tree is quite impressive, especially with you living in a dry climate like Colorado. Drooping leaves can sometimes be attributed to a root bound plant, meaning that the roots are choking each other and making it hard for the plant to get the air and water it needs. When was the last time you repotted your money tree? Misting will help with the browning on the tips. The average home is dryer than the sahara desert, mostly because of AC and frequent cool air movement. In the garden shop I work at we had a money tree doing the same browning and dropping of leaves as you described. Misting helped quite a bit. The black spots could be a bacterial problem. Did they show up after the plant started looking sad or before? If after, then they came because the plant was in a weakened state. If before, then the bacteria might be the source of the problems. Do the black spots turn into the little holes in your plant? If its bacteria then the only way you can control it is to pull all the leaves infected and throw them away. Also the cleaning mentioned above might help. I recommend letting the soil dry out between waterings. This allows the roots to breathe and would be a good recovery tactic if your plant is root bound. Also be sure to fertilize your plant with a slow release (preferably organic) fertilizer. This will allow the plant to take the nutrition it needs and not burn the plant like some liquid fertilizers can. Well, I hope I helped. Good luck on your Pachira's recovery. Sincerely, Roselyn Small

Most plants will grow new roots once their pots can drain. That will use a lot of energy, so although it should stop declining, don't be surprised if it takes a while before the the plant starts to look a lot better. My guess is that you weren't checking the soil at the bottom of the pot, which stayed wet enough to kill roots that tried to grow. In the future, break a 3/8" (or thereabouts) dowel in half and sharpen all four ends in a pencil sharpener or with a utility knife. Push the dowel through the soil all the way to the bottom of the pot, wait a few seconds, and don't water until it is completely dry and unstained by soil, at which point there's still plenty of moisture inside the soil particles available to the roots even though it feels dry. Watering without drainage can leave harmful mineral deposits in the soil. Get rid of them by flushing the pot with 10 times its capacity of room temperature R/O water (sold cheaply from supermarket machines). Then fertilize with a solution of something like like Miracle Grow 3:1:2 General Purpose granules until 10-15% of the solution drains from the pot. When I did this to my mineral-strangled ficuses I could almost hear them sign with relief.

Hello Ken. Thank you for the detailed response. I have considered that I’m loving it to death and have tried to space out the stress points. This started a few months ago at least when I was definitely not loving it to death. When I first noticed it, I thought it was a light issue, so I moved it to the windows. After about a month of deterioration, I sprayed it with the anti pest/anti mildew then waited about a month, then wiped down the leaves with water to remove the dust and waited a month, then repotted it and pulled some of the dead leaves off. Maybe that’s still too much stress, but it seems to be deteriorating rapidly, so I didn’t want to waste too much time. It has been about three weeks now since i repotted it. The soil seems to be draining/drying fine. I did bare root it to see if there was root rot, but I did not see any, and the old soil smelled fine. I used completely new soil. I think it gets plenty of light by the southerly window. It is near a vent, but we rarely have to use our heat believe it or not, and this all started before it was near the vent. The picture with my hand in it is one of the last shoots that made it past a bud. I included it because of how the leaves are deformed. There are a lot of buds that have sprouted and then just stopped growing entirely by the looks of it. Some of those smaller ones in the picture have been that size for at least a couple months. At this point I’m planning on letting it alone for a while and hoping the repotting and extra light of the spring will revive it. To your point, I don’t want to stress it anymore, but I posted this in case someone could look at the leaves and say, “this is a clear case of this kind of mildew...” or something like that. Thank you again for your response.

I stop fertilizing when temps rise above 80-85*. High temps make roots and the above ground parts of plants very lethargic when they need water most. How readily water moves into cells depends on the level of solutes within the cell. The higher the level of solutes in the cell, the easier it is for water to pass through the semi-permeable cell membrane and into the cell. Conversely, the lower the level of solutes in the soil solution (free water in soil), the easier the cell solution passes the membrane into the cell. For a high % of terrestrial plants other than cacti, root function begins to drop off at root/soil temps of about 80*. If the pot is shaded, root/soil temps usually lag ambient air temps by 10-15*F due to evaporative cooling, so as long as the soil is moist, air temps in shade would need to be in the mid 90s before there was a serious issue with root function. In full sun pounding the pots, soil temps can be much higher - at least 15* higher than ambient air temps in most cases, though that varies too with soil moisture levels and air movement. High root temps are a stealthy attacker. Most often, you won't even realize the damage done to roots (especially trees) on the sunny side of the pot until late fall or even early spring when branches on what was the sunny side of the tree start dying and root rot becomes an issue to deal with. So to be safe, I stop fertilizing at 80*F which facilitates water uptake and movement in the plant. That is also why I try to use controlled release fertilizers sparingly. Their release rate is driven primarily by temperature, so when temperatures reach the point where you want to pull back on the level of salts in the soil solution, controlled release fertilizers will have rendered the grower with no control other than trying to scrape the fertilizer prills off of the top of the soil. I like and feel as though I need the control over nutrition offered by synthetics like Foliage-Pro 9-3-6 in order to achieve the best results. I do use Osmocote-Plus sparingly for younger plants which need to develop more mass before they are started along the path to becoming a bonsai, but not on the trees which are in the stage where I have started developing finer branching and am reducing leaf size. That and beyond is when control is most important. For other hobby growers not saddled with the concerns that come with bonsai, it's simply trying to make it easier for the plant to get water when it needs it most. Al