nexmp76

One of the biggest lessons I've learned are watering during our winter months here. My first year I lost quite a few of my plants to over watering during the winter months. I kept them in a lighted plant room but the temperatures were cooler at night in winter months. Since then, I keep most of mine in the garage over winter and let them go dormant. I've barely had to water those at all until the weather's warms up in the spring. I have a large temperature controlled basement with a grow tent that I keep my more sensitive plants and smaller pups over winter which worked well last year.

The other big thing is medium. I started using a mix of 60/30/10 mix of potting soil, peat moss, and perlite. That was fine during the heat of summer but did pretty poorly during cooler months. I think I lost about a third of my plants the first winter. I then moved mostly to about a 20/30/50 potting soil, coconut coir, and perlite and that works very well for most. I recently tried using horticultural sand for more sensitive types after reading about it from this thread and it really seems to do extremely well. The drainage is amazing. I had a Gros Michel type that was struggling and it has since recovered well. The biggest problem has been trying to find a source to get larger amounts for the money so I plan to mostly use that for the most sensitive types.

Overall, I would say the key for me has been finding the best medium to allow the most drainage during the few colder months we have here to avoid rot. I had a very high success rate last year but keep fine tuning each year.