I have a tropical plant (see picture). It still produces new leaves but at the same time most of its older leaves are drying out, starting from their tips. I water it every day (the instructions say to keep the soil moist), and every few months I add some fertilizer. I haven't moved the plant in almost a year but it keeps drying out. What should I do? Thanks!
Here's some info that might help: http://www.thegardenhelper.com/troubleshooting.html
My guess would be buildup of salts and fertilizer in the soil, with low humidity as a possible additional factor (but I really don't think it's just low humidity). If you're watering every day, you're probably never really flushing the soil very well, I suspect you're just topping it off so that the top few inches of soil get wet again. It would be better at least occasionally to let the plant dry out a little bit more, then when you water really give it a good flushing through, otherwise the fertilizer that you put in there and any salts that come in if you have hard water will stick around in the soil and can cause symptoms like that. You might also consider repotting into some fresh soil--you mentioned that you haven't moved it in a year so I'm assuming it's been in the same soil that whole time too so changing the soil would be helpful (that will at least temporarily get rid of the built up salts too). The older leaves that have already gone brown around the edges won't go back to green, but hopefully you should see that leaves that aren't browning now won't get that way.
All the long straggley bit of growth that has come over the pot, I would cut those off right back to the main stem where they have come from, your plant was never meant to grow that way, (we call them Snake plants because of the pattern on the leaves, but they also dont like being in too wet soil, and away from really bright light, dapple light is more than enough. to get your plant to bush out a bit after you remove the long bits, use your finger and thumb to pinch out the growing tips of a couple of the branches, withing about 4 weeks, you will see new side shoots start to grow, do this every time you see long growth and your plant will get larger instead of long and brown at the tips of the leaves, re pot as Ecrane said, fresh compost will do a lot of good, but perhaps not into a larger pot just yet, remove some old soil from around the roots to get some air into the roots and soil, but do that gently. best of luck. WeeNel.
