Loop templates

Plant watering schedule and care checklist

Houseplants die from routine as often as from neglect: watering every plant every Sunday whether it needs it or not. This schedule gives you two short watering rounds a week where you check before you pour, a feeding reminder that rides along every fourth round, and one small care job each Sunday.

The checklist

Watering round (twice a week, for example Monday and Thursday)

  • Push a finger into each pot. If the top 2–3 cm are dry, water until it drains from the bottom. If it's still damp, leave it.
  • Empty saucers after 15 minutes so roots don't sit in water.
  • Succulents and cacti need far less: check them, but most rounds they'll be skipped.

Feeding — every fourth watering round you check off, so about every two weeks. In autumn and winter most houseplants rest: skip it then.

One care job each Sunday, in rotation

  1. Turn the pots a quarter turn so they grow evenly towards the light.
  2. Dust the leaves with a damp cloth.
  3. Pest check — undersides of leaves, sticky patches, fine webbing.
  4. Roots and drainage — roots coming out of the bottom mean a bigger pot, ideally in spring.
  5. Tidy up — remove yellow leaves and dead stems.

General guidance only: your plants' needs depend on light, pot and season. When a plant label says otherwise, follow the label.

Why a loop instead of a calendar

A watering calendar says "water on Monday". A good plant owner says "check on Monday". DoLoop has a verb for that: Abort records the round as skipped without pretending you watered. The five care jobs sit in a loop, so each one comes back every five weeks without you tracking which one you did last.

Set it up in DoLoop

  1. Create a Schedule task called Watering round. Under Active Days tick Monday and Thursday; under If Missed choose Reschedule (keep armed), so a missed round waits for you. Put the checking steps in the description.
  2. Add Feed the plants as a Subtask, parent task Watering round, Every N occurrences = 4: it counts the rounds you checked, not the ones you skipped. Abort it in the resting months.
  3. Create a loop called Plant care, type Schedule, Active Days = Sunday, and add the five care jobs in order.
  4. On watering days and Sundays, press Fill the todo!. Today's Tasks shows the round and, on Sundays, the care job.
  5. Check what you did, Abort what wasn't needed. DoLoop counts both, so you can see how often the round actually needed water.

What DoLoop doesn't do (yet)

DoLoop is not a plant app: no plant database, no species advice, no sensors, no reminders. It keeps the routine in order and shows the next job when you press Fill the todo!. There is no one-click import of this template; setup is the steps above.

Setting up this loop takes a few minutes.

Sign up