Chances are your pothos is looking a little scraggly and you’re wondering what you can do to help it be more bushy and full like it once was. I’m here to help! It’s a very common complaint (I’ve struggled with it) and is especially common with older pothos plants. I’ll be going over exactly what your options are and thankfully, it’s quite an easy fix.
To make a pothos (Epipremnum) fuller you can;
- Prune it back heavily
- Add in pothos cuttings to the soil (rooted or unrooted)
- Provide bright indirect light
- Keep temperatures between 70-85°F
- Fertilize every 2-3 months when actively growing
Why Is My Pothos Leggy?
We need to understand the cause of this problem so it doesn’t keep recurring and frustrate us over and over again, right? Well, the cause of your pothos becoming leggy, where you feel like you have more stem than leaves, is most often due to it being left unpruned. That’s right. Your pothos isn’t bushy because you haven’t been cutting it back. It seems almost counter-intuitive that you need to be pruning your pothos to help it be more full, but it’s true. You should regularly prune/pinch back stems to help your pothos grow bushy and full.
How to Encourage Bushy Growth
Now that we know that pruning is the way to encourage bushy and more full growth, it’s now a question of how we go about pruning and encouraging this new growth.
1. Prune Your Pothos
The pothos is known for being a tough houseplant and that fact remains true when it comes to pruning. It can handle a pretty heavy pruning by cutting back stems to just as little as two inches above the soil line, making sure to leave one or two leaves. Pruning off ALL the leaves won’t do much good since it will literally cut off the pothos’ source of obtaining energy and will most likely lead to a dead stubs that might not bounce back. So be sure to leave some leaves! The pothos can also handle a lighter pruning if you’re just wanting to take your pothos back a few inches for now. Using pruning shears or a clean pair of kitchen scissors will do just fine!
If you aren’t sure whether to prune back heavily or lightly, just know that pruning your pothos more on the heavy side will really reinvigorate your pothos and force new growth at its base. This new growth at its base will leave your plant looking much bushier in the long term. It may seem scary to prune your pothos but new shoots will grow from the old stem and it benefits the plant to not get too overgrown and it looks better.
2. Add in New Growth
Besides pruning your pothos, you can actually add in new growth yourself and create an almost instant bushier pothos plant. There are two ways to do this; put in your own propagated cuttings or putting in entirely new plants.
The pothos plant is incredibly easy to propagate and can be propagated in water or in soil. You can even start this process after you’ve pruned your pothos as mentioned above and have those pieces of pothos sitting around.
I recommend taking multiple cuttings and rooting them all at the same time. Simply take your cuttings and trim them so that the base of the cutting has a node there. A node on a pothos are those small brown-ish nubs or bumps along the stem and that’s where the new roots will start growing from. In the wild, these nodes anchor the plant to the ground or as it climbs, but as a cutting, it grows roots and allows you to create a new separate plant. Your cutting will also need about 2-5 leaves in order to successfully grow, we can’t be cutting off their source of obtaining energy!
Once your cuttings are ready to go, you can place them directly into the soil of your pothos in any empty areas OR you can place them in water to grow roots and transfer them over once the roots are about 2-3 inches long. Whether you start the cuttings in soil or in water is just a matter of personal preference. My personal preference is to put them directly into the soil just so I can skip the step of having to transfer them from water into soil.
If you have no cuttings to work with but would still like to create an instant bushier look, you can buy small pothos plants from your local hardware store, greenhouse, or online and transfer those small plants into your original pothos’ plant pot into areas that are bare.
3. Provide Bright Indirect Light
Providing adequate light for your pothos seems intuitive but it’s something that can be easily overlooked and cause your pothos to look scraggly. This doesn’t happen overnight, inadequate light slowly turns your pothos into a sad scraggly mess. They prefer bright indirect light (best found in south-facing windows) since this amount of light promotes healthy, sustainable, and fuller growth. Plants that get enough light push out new growth to soak in all this energy found in the sunlight instead of keeping only the bare amount of leaves to survive because it’s not getting enough energy.
When your pothos is getting enough light it also lessens the chances of over-watering since your pothos is actively pulling up more water to grow with all the sunlight it’s getting. So there are more benefits than one by putting your pothos in a well-lit area of your home or office.
4. Keep temperatures between 70-85°F
The pothos is a tropical plant and are native to Southeast Asia where it’s warm and humid. When we mimic a pothos’ natural habit by providing a warm home in the temperature range of 70-85°F (21-29°C), it’s able to grow without hindrance. A pothos plant is a hardy plant to be sure and can handle some cold drafts and harsher conditions than other houseplants, but for it’s best growing abilities, it needs a warmer temperature.
5. Fertilize regularly
Once you have gone through all the other steps and your pothos is in good health, you can fertilize your pothos. If you try to fertilize your pothos when it’s struggling with other issues, it can be just the little bit of stress that pushes it over the edge. A scraggly pothos is no reason not to fertilize, but a yellowing one is. So if your pothos is looking healthy, I recommend grabbing a 20-20-20 all purpose houseplant fertilizer and using it about every three weeks that your pothos is actively growing. Here’s a link to the fertilizer I use for my pothos.
In general, I find my pothos plants usually growing in late winter to spring but it can be different for everyone depending on where you live and what kind of sunlight you’re pothos is getting. Just keep an eye out for new rapid growth and start fertilizing when you see that new growth coming through.
Conclusion
By regularly pruning your pothos, putting cuttings or small pothos plants into bare soil areas, providing adequate light & temperatures, and fertilizing your pothos you can quickly and easily create a bushier pothos plant that’s going to last for the long term. Now it’s just a matter of keeping the plant happy and healthy with everything else. But with the pothos plants, that’s not a terribly hard thing to do!
If you’re wanting to see this article in action and see exactly how I made my pothos more full, you can watch my video here: