Dear All, I have this avocado plant indoors. It's growing like crazy (it's 2 meters tall), but recently the leaves started turning brown (from the edges inward), at a pretty high rate. Do you think it's some kind of fungus, or is it just normal leaf-dying? It's in a pretty small pot, but I just repotted it into a slightly bigger one (still small: 18 cm high, 22 cm diameter), after which it sprouted three new branches -- and the leaves started turning brown. I'm already battling gnats and brown scale on other plants, and I am just super-paranoid about yet another decease. So if you tell me that the pot is simply too small for the plant, this would be great news... Thanks!
Agreed - more humidity will definitely help this, it doesn't look like any insects or disease I've ever seen on my avocados. You might also want to back it away from the window just a teensy bit - the cold that's coming through the glass won't do it any favours either.
Interveinal chlorosis suggests a nutritional problem. If it happens the plant has had the same humidity for years then that would also cast doubt on low humidity producing this effect. Since damage appeared after repotting, implication is something involved with that is the problem, such as too much of a particular nutrient in the potting medium used.
Thanks a lot for the replies! Not a fungus -- already a huge relief. It's been in exactly the same spot for the last couple of years (same window, same humidity) and has done very well, aside from after repotting. As for the nutritional mismatch -- hm, I'm on a slightly different level of sophistication here... My plants either get MiracleGro, or MiracleGro plus some sand if they are a cactus (this one did not qualify). So I am not even sure where to start to fix the problem. (I have a rabbit foot fern which also seems to be suffering from some kind of nutritional need, and it's supposed to be an easy plant, isn't it?) One other thing I did not mention is that the thing was so overgrown that I literally had to screw it out of the old pot, since it grew roots through the holes in the bottom. Can this be from the damage to those roots I did while repotting? But then again it had all that new growth, too...
Yes, root damage during repotting could well affect the older leaves. The old leaves are the first ones the plant will run down and discard in any stress event, with new leaf production to generate the energy for damage repair.
