Any green experts here?
My plant is just having these yellow spots and then the leaf dies.
There are no insects underleaf though… so what’s wrong?
According to a local gardening site, yellow leaves on a hibiscus plant usually mean over or under watering. If the plant is in a pot its is probably over watering.
Also could be indicative of low nitrogen or iron.
Just this morning, I was moving a pot with a hibiscus. The pot has no drain hole, and we’ve had a lot of rain here in Texas recently, so the pot has been waterlogged for weeks. But the hibiscus plant has grown more and is healthier-looking than any hibiscus I’ve ever had. I was thinking this morning that it must be impossible to over-water a hibiscus.
Those are not leaves yellowing from overwatering, which usually presents as a general change of color to the leaf as a whole. These spots are localized enough to suggest pests.
@teddybound, we’d need closer pics of front and back of the leaves, of the plant itself, and a detailed description of the conditions it’s kept in and of how this situation has progressed. Otherwise we’d mostly just be guessing.
Call your county extension office. If they can’t help you they should be able to put you in touch with a local master gardener who serve as community volunteers.
I have grown Hibiscus for many years in the Houston, TX climate.
I think strongly that you have been using a general purpose or bloom booster fertilizer. Those fertilizers works great on most plants but not on Hibiscus.
For Hibiscus, you need a fertilizer high in Potassium and low in Phosphorus. You can buy a fertilizer which is specifically sold / marked for Hibiscus. Alternatively, you can add potassium fertilizer to all purpose fertilizer.
Wishing you lots of lovely flowers
so u were right and there were pests after I closely examined it a few weeks later!
these cretins are so small I still dont know what they are but I have doused all of them with isopropyl alcohol…
I hope the plant will recover…
here’s the pic:
I am not a plant expert but I do have a hibiscus. I don’t think alcohol is the textbook method for dealing with pests although might be effective if you have mealybugs and otherwise know what can be done safely with a particular plant. Normally you would use an insecticidal soap.
Nearly two years after the fact the plant may have gone to hisbiscus heaven, but the last photograph seems to show scale insects, which would explain the discoloration along leaf veins.
Scale is often very hard to eradicate as the pests are resistant to sprays and mechanical removal. I tossed out a venerable lemon tree last year because it had a heavy scale infestation.