FullyGrows is a houseplant site written for the moment something has gone wrong and you want a straight answer, not a listicle.
Who writes this
FullyGrows is written and maintained by one home grower. Not a botanist, not a horticulturist, and the site does not pretend otherwise. What is behind it is a house with plants in it, some of which have done well and some of which did not survive.
Everything here is grown indoors in a dry Southern California climate: bright indirect light from a south-facing window, low humidity most of the year, and indoor temperatures that sit around 60 to 69°F through winter because the heating rarely comes on. That last detail matters more than it sounds. Most houseplant advice is written for homes running radiators from October to March, and dry air from air conditioning behaves differently from dry air from a furnace.
Currently doing well: an Aglaonema on the kitchen counter that pushes out a new leaf every few weeks, and a ZZ plant that is healthy apart from one stem gone entirely yellow, which is being watched rather than panicked about. There is also a pothos growing in the ZZ’s pot that nobody planted and that has been left alone on purpose.
Lost along the way: a braided money tree, and a golden pothos. Which is its own small joke, given that a pothos has since turned up uninvited in a pot meant for something else.
The failures matter more than the successes here. A plant that died tells you which advice was wrong, and most of what now gets checked before publishing came from getting something wrong first.
Why the older posts are being rewritten
This site has several hundred guides on it, and a lot of them were not good enough. They were thin, they repeated themselves, and in places they were simply wrong.
Real examples found while going back through them:
- A guide to planting elephant ear bulbs that gave two different planting depths, one in the body of the article and a different one in its own FAQ.
- A post titled “the best soil for ZZ plants” that recommended “a combination of peat moss, perlite, and potting soil” four separate times without ever giving a ratio.
- An article titled “when to plant elephant ear bulbs” whose sections were mostly about where and how to plant them instead.
Those are being fixed one post at a time rather than left up. Each rewrite is checked against primary sources, has to actually answer the question in its title, and gets merged away entirely if the topic is already covered better elsewhere on the site.
How a post gets researched
- Every factual claim is verified at the time of writing. Nothing is written from memory, and nothing is carried over from the old version of a post simply because it was already sitting there.
- University extension services first. Clemson, Illinois, NC State, Iowa State and their equivalents run the horticulture programs that most houseplant advice is downstream of. Where a post gives a temperature range or a hardiness zone, that is usually the source.
- Safety claims get a higher bar. Anything about toxicity to cats, dogs or children is checked against a primary source, never against what other plant blogs say. Plant blogs copy each other, and toxicity is exactly the topic where that goes badly wrong.
- Popular advice gets checked rather than repeated. Sometimes the consensus is wrong. Nearly every article about curling philodendron leaves blames low humidity first, while Illinois Extension notes that philodendrons handle the dry air of a heated house quite well. That kind of thing gets flagged instead of passed along.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, say so and it will be fixed, with a note saying what changed. Given how many of these posts are still waiting their turn to be reviewed, assume there are errors that have not been found yet.
The contact form is the fastest way to reach us, or email contact@fullygrows.com.