Help with my Fuchsia!

[Corman08]

First off, I am a newbie without a green thumb, but want to learn.

I bought a little fuchsia from a home depot about two weeks ago that looked healthy and like it was about to bloom. I planted it in an plastic pot (used to be a hanging basket pot) with holes in the bottom for water to escape. I keep it near my house where it gets some sun but hardly direct harsh sunlight (which I thought I was suppose to do), I water basically every day but do my best to not over water, if the soil is damp I only give it minimal water. Well since I've been doing this the first week it looked as if it was growing beautifully, getting a little bigger and starting to bloom, then the second week it has been in a slow decline. I am struggling to keep it healthy, everyday it looks worse than the day before. I move it around experimenting with different amounts of sunlight but to no avail. I saw somewhere that the plastic pot might be drying out the roots real fast and I do live in the midwest (St. Louis), and we have are share of heavy heat spells than the next week the temp will drop to a comfortable level.

Any help would be much appreciated, love the flower and want to see it strive

[rainbowgardener]

Watering every day sounds like considerably too much. And they don't like ANY direct sun.

The best fuchsia I ever had was one I over wintered in my bathroom. It LOVED it there. The only light was through the frosted glass bathroom window and plenty of humidity from showers and baths. It thrived all winter. Then in spring I brought it out on my deck in a spot where it got maybe two hours of morning direct sun and it promptly shrivelled up and died.

It prefers to get its moisture from humidity and being misted, not from watering the roots.

[lorax]

Second'd to RBG's advice. Fuchsias are from my neck of the woods and they grow exclusively in cloud forests. That is, forests in which the cloud rarely ever parts to let the sun through. If you can treat yours like that (keep it in indirect light, plant it in soil with intensely fast drainage, mist it rather than watering it, and water once a week or so when the soil is quite dry) then it will reward you with years of blooms.

Otherwise, in my experience, they do tend to die.