Beginner Gardening: Saving an overwatered dracaena, 0 by x50

x50 wrote:
Thanks again for the replies.

Pistil - That certainly makes sense and is true for most new endeavors for me in life :-). You learn the most from mistakes and failures. Unfortunately, I\'m still not quite sure what went wrong here but I suspect it is the combination that killed all but one of my plants during my first attempt at keeping some (jumping between extremes, too much water, not enough water, too much water, repeat cycle).. haha.

Funny though, I have extremely limited experience but so far mine has been the opposite. Dracaenas have been my \"most successful\" attempt at house plants. I have one \"Corn Plant\" that about 4 years old now. It had been living a pretty lonely life, even for a plant, being the sole survivor of my previous half-hearted attempt. All others died within a year. I\'m much more invested this time around.. mostly in learning and attempting to do it correctly. Funny that I love nature and have always loved the tropical/subtropical plants (actually, pretty much anything not native to Ohio, I love the plants to the south and southwest of the country) but never really made the connection that I could bring more of this environment and nature to me.

Vance - Thank you very much for that link. I\'ve learned a lot about potting mixes and wish I had read more before I started planting this spring/summer. That post is awesome and I\'ll definitely be giving that a try next year (maybe this year for a few plants). I live in a townhouse (more like an apartment than a condo, really) so creating that mix is likely going to be a challenge. Most stores here with Garden Centers are getting pretty sparse on supplies and I don\'t have anywhere to store bulk supplies. I\'m going to try and move some smaller plants over to a similar mix this year and then take this approach for everything next year.

From what I read in that post, I think using a mix as Al outlined will be the single greatest factor in being more successful... especially with my tendency to jump between over watering and then underwatering (usually as a reaction to realizing I\'ve overwatered).

Attached a recent picture of the plant. It seems to be rotting from the top down (the best I can tell). Probably doesn\'t help that I let it outside and it rained but I have little faith it can be salvaged at this point. The browning (rotting? maybe just dying?) is continuing to spread downward. I\'ve already cut the tallest stem back below the browning. I\'m probably going to chop off the top, below the shoots, to leave just the \"trunk\" or main stem and see if it continues. I thought root rot always went from the bottom (soil) upwards, not the other way around but I have another more mature Dracaena doing basically the same thing after it was trimmed back. There\'s also no odor, which I read was common for rot in these plants.