Rant: it took me 4 months to figure out why my pothos leaves kept going yellow

Robert Craig · 2026-09-23T19:25:05.788605+00:00

I have had this golden pothos for about 3 years and last winter it started dropping yellow leaves, one every few days. I did the normal stuff first, moved it away from the drafty window in my apartment here in Boise, cut back on watering to every 10 days, checked for bugs with a flashlight at night. Nothing worked. Around the 2 month mark I bought a moisture meter and a little bottle of houseplant food, thinking it was either root rot or a lack of nutrients. Still yellow. Then a guy at the nursery on Fairview told me to pull the whole thing out of the pot and look at the roots instead of just the top inch of soil. Turned out the bottom half of the root ball was packed tight and dry as a bone because the soil had gone hydrophobic, so water was running straight down the sides and out the drainage holes the whole time. I soaked the root ball in a bucket for 20 minutes and repotted it in fresh mix with some perlite, and it pushed out 6 new leaves in 3 weeks. Four months of guessing for something that one nursery guy diagnosed in about 30 seconds. Has anyone else run into soil that stops absorbing water like that, and how often do you actually repot to avoid it?

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Rant: it took me 4 months to figure out why my pothos leaves kept going yellow | Botany Lovers - Rigidtalk