The reason plant-sitting goes wrong is almost never that the sitter didn’t care. It’s that they were handed instructions written by someone who already knows the answer. “Water when the top inch is dry” is a perfectly good rule and a terrible instruction, because it asks a person who has never met your monstera to make a judgement call and be confident about it.
Write actions, not conditions
Everything good about a set of sitting instructions follows from this. Your sitter should be able to do the whole job without deciding anything.
Compare:
- Bad: “Water the ferns when they look thirsty, they’re quite sensitive.”
- Good: “Saturday: two mugs of water into the big fern by the bookshelf. That’s the only thing that needs doing this week.”
The second version can be executed by someone thinking about something else, which is the realistic condition your sitter is in. Specific vessel, specific quantity, specific day, specific plant, nothing to interpret.
The five things to actually leave them
1. A list of only the plants that need something
Not your whole collection. If eleven of your fifteen plants can go a fortnight untouched, they don’t belong on the list — putting them there just creates work and anxiety. Write down the four that need attention and say plainly that everything else is already handled.
2. Which plant is which, unambiguously
Species names are useless to a non-plant-person. Location plus size plus a photo is what works: “the tall one on the floor next to the TV.” If two plants look similar, put a sticky note on the pot. A photo of each plant with its instruction next to it removes every remaining doubt, and takes about four minutes to make on your phone.
3. The amount, in an object they can see
“A good soak” means nothing. “Fill this blue jug to the line and pour it all in” means something. Leave the jug or the watering can out on the counter where they’ll trip over it, and fill in the measurement in terms of that specific object.
4. Explicit permission to skip
This is the one people leave out and it matters more than the rest. Tell your sitter, in writing: if you’re unsure, don’t water it. A plant that misses a watering is nearly always fine. A plant that gets watered three times because a conscientious person kept worrying about it is at real risk, and root damage from a waterlogged fortnight is much harder to walk back than a bit of drought.
Saying this also does something for the sitter, who is usually more nervous about killing your plants than you are. Take the pressure off and they’ll do a better job.
5. What to do if something looks wrong
Give them one instruction and one contact method. “If anything looks dramatic, send me a photo — don’t try to fix it.” That’s it. Most of what looks alarming to a non-plant-person (a yellow lower leaf, a bit of drooping) is normal, and the fixes an anxious helper reaches for — more water, more sun, a bigger pot — are usually worse than the problem.
Things not to put in the instructions
- Misting. It’s a lot of effort for a very short-lived humidity bump, and it turns a five-minute job into a chore your sitter starts resenting on day three.
- Fertiliser. Nothing needs feeding during a two-week absence, and a mis-measured dose is a real way to hurt a plant.
- Rotating, pruning, repotting, dusting. All of it can wait for you.
- Explanations. You do not need to teach them why. A paragraph on why thecalathea wants filtered water gives a person one more thing to get wrong.
Set it up before you need it
The universal failure is writing the instructions at 11pm the night before a flight, from memory, badly. If you write them once now — while you’re calm and standing next to the plants — you can reuse them for every trip, adjusting the frequencies for the season.
Take the photos at the same time. A shared album or a note with four photos and four sentences is the entire artefact, and it’s the difference between a sitter who feels capable and one who is quietly guessing.
If you want this to be automatic
This is one of the things Family Greenhouse was built for. You can hand a sitter a time-boxed link — up to a week on the free plan, up to 90 days on a paid one: they open it and see the tasks due while you’re away, plus anything already overdue — “Water the Monstera”, with where it lives — and tap them off as they go. No account, no sign-up, no joining your household, and the link stops working when you’re back. You come home to a log of what was done and when, instead of trying to reconstruct it from a half-remembered conversation.
A note on the counter genuinely works too, and for three plants it’s the right amount of technology. The principle doesn’t change either way: give a person actions, not conditions, and tell them it’s fine to skip.