Moving the fiddle-leaf fig six feet closer to the window
The fiddle-leaf fig had been sitting about six feet back from the east window on a plant stand, because that is where it fit in the room. For a year it did nothing. It did not die, which with this plant counts as a success, but it put out no new leaves from March to February, and the lower leaves developed brown edges and dropped, three in total. I measured the light there with a phone app, which is imprecise but consistent, and got about 150 foot-candles at noon on a clear day. Right at the glass, the same app read around 1,200.
So in February I moved it to the window. This meant moving a chair and the whole corner feels wrong, but the plant is now about a foot from the glass with the morning sun hitting the leaves directly for roughly three hours.
The first two weeks, nothing visible, and I was braced for the leaf drop that this plant is famous for whenever anything changes. It dropped one leaf, a lower one that was already marked. Then in the third week the top bud, which had been a tight brown point for months, began to swell and split, and a new leaf unfurled over about ten days, pale and soft and about half the size of the mature ones. A second followed three weeks later, and a third three weeks after that.
Watering has changed with the move. In the dark spot I was watering roughly every two weeks and the meter showed the lower soil staying damp for ten days. By the window it dries in six or seven, and I water when the meter reads dry at four inches, which has worked out to about weekly. The new leaves have no brown edges so far, which I had read was often a watering problem but which I now suspect was mostly a light problem in disguise.
The lesson I keep learning with every plant in this apartment is that a few feet matters enormously. Six feet from an east window is, as far as the plant is concerned, a cave. I have since moved the rubber plant up to the window as well and demoted a snake plant to the dark corner, where it will presumably be fine, because snake plants are fine with everything.