Just going by your pictures I think for the most part you are watering too much for this time of the year. Also it looks like some of your plants are not getting enough light - this is a widespread problem with desert succulents in particular as indoor plants in ordinary living spaces. With these needing supplemental lighting to perform fully, when not located in sunny greenhouses or similarly bright situations. Otherwise two subgroups that are commonly apt are foliage house plants and flowering house plants. With the latter set also needing more light to function well than kinds being grown just for their leaves.

I think it more likely to be a planting media issue, which is something that is certainly impacted by improper or irregular watering practices. This accounts for the majority of failures with growing houseplants, both the foliage types and most especially, cacti and succulents.

I'd suggest you spend some time on the Container Gardening forum reviewing all those many posts discussing the benefits of selecting and using the best planting media to generate optimum results. I'd start with this:Container Soils and Water Movement and Retention.

While there are more than a hundred factors that can seriously affect your plants in a negative way, the primary factors are related to 1) whether or not your chosen grow medium allows you to water correctly AND maintain a healthy ratio of air to water in the medium at all times, something Pam (Gardengal) mentioned immediately above. 2) whether or not you are able to provide as much light as the plant wants, not just enough to keep it alive, enough that as the plant enters the dark months of late fall through early spring, it has a store of food/ energy sufficient to act as a supplement to its current and limited ability to synthesize its food/ energy (sugar/ glucose) during photosynthesis. A plant often uses more food/ energy than it can create in winter, and that is an unsustainable arrangement, which is why light is so important. 3) Nutrition. The most important considerations when choosing or making container media are its structure, and its ability to maintain that structure for as long as the plant is expected to live in the same pot between repotting sessions. This thought brings us full circle, again, to the importance of a medium's ability to hold a favorable mix of air and water, even after a thorough watering. Since the main consideration IS on structure and not on the medium's ability to provide nutrients, the grower must shoulder that obligation. Choosing an appropriate fertilizer and having an efficient/ controllable supplementation plan is one of the primary considerations if your plants are to have the best chance at realizing as much of their genetic potential as possible.

This Overview of Good Growing Practices, if implemented, will help you avoid all the common pitfalls that befall almost every grower along their path to a green thumb.

If you think you might have questions I can answer, don't hesitate to ask.

Al

welcome to the forums ..

if you wish to discuss each plant individually.. then start an individual post for each plant ... that is probably the way to go .. as al says in his first line.. there are too many variables to discuss each of your plants in one post. ...

imo ... you should not water again.. until a plant shows some indication of wilting .. make note.. and that is your watering period for that plant ...

you should not need to poke your media.. to dry out soil.. you just need to stop watering... until it dries itself ...

media is a water management system wherein you learn how to water properly no matter what media you have ..... while allowing the media to retain what is needed.. and drain away the rest.. allowing the media to near dry.. before you water again ...

if your media does not dry .. it is just as much your fault for continuously watering.. as it is the media fault.. for not being able to drain away what you are adding to the pot ...

on some level.. you are loving your plants.. toward their death.. if you keep it up ... id bet my shiny penny.. with all the plants you have in our house.. ambient humidity.. that you could water once a month.. and most of your plants wouldnt mind ... and if they wilt in the mean time.. give them a sip of water ... do you water once a month??... once a week.. every other day????

ken

Thank you Ken, I usually don't water until they dry out and wilt a bit just to be safe, but a lot of times the soil won't dry well even though it has drainage (especially for bigger plants). All of my pots have many holes for drainage, and I try to be careful that I don't water too much at once as well. With my monstera, it has proper drainage but takes around over a month to fully dry out and it shows signs of overwatering. This has been confusing though because I've had it for maybe 6 or so months, and I've watered it only 3 times, but it keeps getting worse like it's still been overwatered. Though, this could also be humidity or another issue like maybe the aftermath of the fungus problem. With the majority of my plants, I just check up on the dryness of the soil every few days and make sure they're showing signs of needing water before watering them (which is maybe about every 2-4 weeks for most of them). Thanks again!

Thank you AI, I really appreciate the advice! Do you think my soil just does not have proper structure for these plants? With the light, my room gets a decent amount of light from a south window throughout the day, but I can see how it could be an issue as it still isn't exactly bright. Would grow lights possibly be a better option for my bright-light-loving plants? I do struggle a bit with medium-light plants too, since I can't always tell if they need more or not. Unfortunately, I've had a harder time reading light issues than anything else so far. Thank you so so much!

Thank you Gardengal, my foliage plants do seem to be struggling the most which has been surprising to me. I'm sure my watering is probably pretty irregular or improper though as you said, because I occasionally feel the soil and look for signs of slight wilting before watering. However, sometimes I forget to check for longer than usual and end up watering late. Could an irregular schedule like that contribute to making plants unhappy? Thank you for your help!

Thank you Embothrium, I typically wait to water plants before they dry out and show a few signs of wilting. Though, it may just be that I need to wait longer since most plants recover much easier from underwatering than overwatering. I'm definitely noticing a light issue too, but unfortunately my area is filled with trees that block out sun. My most open area is a southern window, but I've had to fit most of my plants near a western one because that was my next best option. Would grow lights be a good investment maybe? I think most of my struggle plants are indoor plants so I worry that taking them outside could be too much light, but with grow lights I may be able to adjust that better so could those work? Thank you so much for your help!

Letting plants wilt on purpose is a dangerous plan. Aim for more consistency.

Sometimes there just isn't enough light for some plants inside. Are you aiming for winter survival, or permanent indoor specimens? When taking any plant outside, after being inside for more than a couple of weeks, it can burn. Always acclimate gradually if you do that. I take 99% of my plants outside during the warm season. I would put bananas, panda, and Aloe as close to my most sunny window as possible. Lights are an option but I can't advise on that.

One mistake I made when starting with succulents was the mistaken notion that they are all like cacti, so they should bake in the sun all day and don't mind if the soil dries. That's a fallacy for so many plants under the enormous umbrella of "succulent" - which is not something that has a specific definition or complete agreement about which plants are or are not succulents. Anyway, after killing a bunch of them, I started treating them like any other plant, watering before the soil loses all moisture, most of them don't do well baking in the sun all day, and now have a fun collection of various plants that are said to be succulent, that share spaces with many leafy tropicals. All of them get the same basic care, with the exception of a couple of actual cacti. I have over 100 pots, and no time to give each an individual care regime that they don't seem to need anyway.

Hello Lily,

I agree with Tiffany that "Letting plants wilt on purpose is a dangerous plan."

Frequently we overlook the importance of the water we provide our plants. Our tap water is not necessarily the best thing for our plants. Most of the plants on our planet are watered by Mother Nature with rainwater, which is essentially distilled water with a trace of Nitrogen Oxides from atmospheric lightning (and hopefully NOT a lot of industrial contamination. ) Fluorides in our drinking water may be good for our teeth, but Fluorides are not something that is good for our plants. And, although plants need a very small amount of Chlorine, it is questionable whether the amount of Chlorine in our chlorinated drinking water is harmful to our plants.

Our situation is not typical. We live in a rented farmhouse in a rural area, and our water supply is from an open well (a hole in the ground about 8 feet in diameter) so Chlorine and Fluorine aren't an issue. But various forms of agricultural contamination are a serious problem, including various drowned creatures that manage to fall into that 8-foot hole. I refuse to drink Possum juice, so we buy drinking water by the gallon from Walmart to drink and cook with.

But my indoor plants were a problem. (I grow more than a few zinnias indoors as part of my zinnia breeding hobby.) For my indoor plants, I considered installing a tank to catch rainwater from our gutter downspout. But that scheme had its difficulties, including the fact that rainwater would be contaminated with bird poop and squirrel poop from the roof. I ruled out buying gallons of distilled water from Walmart for our plants, based on how much that would cost.

So I considered distilling our possum juice to get purified distilled water. Hospitals, laboratories, universities, and such find it economical to distill their own water and various water distillation units are commercially available. I did some calculating and estimating and concluded that the cost of electricity per gallon to produce the amount of distilled water I would need would be only somewhat less than purchasing distilled water by the gallon. So, back to the drawing board.

Some homes find it feasible to install a Reverse Osmosis unit to purify their available water supply. The Reverse Osmosis units (sometimes referred to simply by the initials RO) use only a very small amount of electricity to power an ultraviolet bulb that kills any kind of bacterial contamination. The water from an RO unit is very close in quality to clean distilled water but can cost a lot less.

I purchased an RO unit online from a supplier named Perfect Water. My current indoor zinnia project uses about 10 gallons of RO water per day and that will probably at least double as my plants grow in size and number. My current RO unit will be capable of supplying a considerably increased water usage. I do need to purchase a new Reverse Osmosis filter about every year, but I am getting the equivalent of distilled water for my indoor zinnia hobby at a very bargain price. My outdoor gardening has no problem with rainwater supplemented with some of our Possum Juice.

For a limited amount of indoor plant watering, you might find Distilled Water by the gallon to be a practical solution, and possibly better for your plants than the tap water from your local city or town water supply.

ZM

(not associated with any product or vendor mentioned or linked)

Thank you Tiffany, I typically don't let them wilt too much unless I miss a watering. For the most part, I wait until it loses a bit of its perk or (with succulents) have drier soil and are slightly wrinkled. I'm a bit timid of watering on a schedule but I can certainly try it now that I have a moisture meter to help me be extra careful. That's very interesting about succulents, I had no idea they were more similar to tropical plants and less like cacti! That will probably help me with them, and that does help me rethink letting the soil dry out fully. Thank you so much for your help.

Thank you ZM, that's interesting! Using distilled water does make a lot of sense, and I may have to make that switch because of my many plants with browning tips. Thanks for sharing your journey with that, ten gallons a day would be insanely expensive. Using that filter for plants definitely seems much more practical, I'll certainly look into it. Thanks again!

Happy to suggest. Best luck!

I'm not sure how helpful a meter will be. People buy them at the beginning of plant journeys but hardly anybody who has had plants for a few years or more uses those. I've never had one.

zen_man, do you know if my seeds I collected from my Zinia Profusion will come true next year? I did not isolate them from the many other zinias in our yard.

Hello William,

Yes, your seeds collected from your Profusion zinnias should come true. If you had several colors of Profusions, it could be possible that bees or other insects could have cross-pollinated a few different colors of Profusions, but those should look fine, too. Seed companies depend on Profusions coming true from seeds but usually grow separate colors in separate fields. Mixed colors can be grown in mixed-color fields.

ZM