How To Make Your ZZ Plant Grow Faster

Welcome to Gardening at 58 North. So in this video I'd like to talk about the ZZ plant and why it might not be growing for you or why it's growing very slowly and how to encourage it into growth and how to make it grow faster as well. So the ZZ plant is a very popular houseplant. It's well renowned for being really hard to kill and being a really tough houseplant but it's also quite well known for being a very slow growing houseplant. There's a few reasons for that which I'll address in this video today. So one of the main things to remember is the ZZ plant is quite a slow growing plant. You're never going to have rapid growth from it but there are several ways that you can increase the growth. And one thing to remember is with the ZZ plant even if you don't see any growth it probably is growing it's just growing its tubers underground. So with the ZZ plant there's a large tuberous root system and it grows these tubers a bit like potatoes. Basically what happens it's in the wild it has a wet season and a dry season. It makes the most of the wet season whilst there's enough water for growth by growing its tubers. It then goes dormant in the dry season and then it starts coming into growth at the very beginning of the wet season again. So what happens in a household environment where it's quite constant temperatures the whole year round, constant watering as well, what will happen is for most of the year it will just be fattening up its tubers. There won't be any change on noticeable change anyway but it's actually gathering a lot of energy and resources putting it into its tuber and then when it's ready it will grow and it will grow quite quickly. You'll have a new shoot come up from the base it'll grow up within probably a few weeks and then it'll sit there and do nothing again for several months again. So there's a few ways you can speed up the growth. One of them is to give it more light. Although these plants can survive very low light levels they are actually better suited to bright light. So in the wild they'll grow in a forest setting or on the edge of a forest setting but they don't grow in the very very darkest areas. Although they can tolerate that light they don't grow at their best. What they actually prefer is a bright indirect light and they can actually take direct sunlight if they're acclimatized to it but as long as it's avoiding the midday sun. So if you have it in a very dark location and you want to speed up its growth moving it to a lighter location is a good idea. Don't put it straight into the very brightest of locations because you will get leaf scots. So slowly introduce it and if you are going to put it into a brighter location the best place would be maybe a north facing windowsill or an east or west facing windowsill that only gets a bit of sunlight first thing in the day or last thing at night. You don't want any midday sun that will certainly be too much for it. But as much bright indirect light as you can give it will really help to boost its growth. The simple reason for that is the more light it gets the more it can photosynthesize. The more it can photosynthesize the more energy it can produce from the carbon dioxide in the air and the light from the sun to produce the tubers that then power up its new growth coming forward. So another way that you can increase the growth is to make sure it's well watered. This is a plant which has very seasonal weather so in the wild it's mostly warm throughout the year but it has a definite wet season and a dry season. If you keep it fairly dry you'll be making the plant think it's in the dry season. What it does when it's struggling for water is it will actually close up the small pores in the leaves. So in most plants and same with the ZZ plant underneath most leaves there's lots of breathing holes. Now they're very hard to see in person but they are there and what the plant will do to conserve water in dry periods is it will close them up. What that means is it can't really breathe very well. It reduces the amount of water it loses but it also means it can't absorb the carbon dioxide it needs for growth. So the whole growth of the plant will slow down massively. So if you make sure it's well watered you'll get much faster growth because it can be constantly breathing absorbing the carbon dioxide it needs for growth and producing those sugars it needs. So the only thing to take note when you do give it more water is make sure you do allow it to dry out very slightly in between waterings and also give it a free draining soil mix. So I've got here a free draining soil mix so I know any excess water can drain out the bottom it's not going to sit there in wet soil. The last thing you want to do is have it in wet soil because that will just lead to rotting of the roots and rotting of the tubers. So just keep it well watered but allow it to drain freely. In relation to the compost pot size is also important. If you've got a very small pot the problem is you've got all these leaves and these leaves are having to be provided nutrients and water from a pot that's quite small. If the pot's very small there's not going to be much space for the roots so those roots can't absorb the water and the nutrients it needs to provide to the leaves. If it doesn't have large enough roots it won't put up any more leaves. It can only really support a certain number of leaves for a certain number of roots. So you want to give it a larger pot if it is pot bound that could also help it to grow faster. What you'll find is when you first repot it you might not get any instant growth because all the growth is going on underground growing those new roots but then a couple of months later you should find that new growth does start to appear once it's bulked up its roots a bit more and it's filled up the new pot you should then get a bit more rapid growth. So another thing that can encourage faster growth is to make sure it's well fed. This is kind of related to the pot size again if it's a smaller pot size there's less feed for it in the soil. If it's been in that pot for a long time or if you have compost such as the cactus compost which is very low in nutrition there's not going to be much nutrients in the plant to power its growth. The plant particularly needs nitrogen for its leaves. If it's low in nitrogen what the plant will do is it will focus most of its growth into the roots and it will even struggle to grow its roots if there's very low levels of nitrogen. So giving it a high nitrogen feed what that will do is it'll give it the nutrients it needs to put on new leaves. The chlorophyll found in the leaves needs a lot of nitrogen anything that's got a lot of leaves needs a lot of nitrogen and as the above ground section of the ZZ plant is pretty much all leaf it doesn't really have any woody stems as such it's a high nitrogen feed that you want to give it to give it that fast growth and to make sure that you're going to have continued good growth. So the final thing I'll add about the ZZ plant is the temperature. It's quite important that you give it a high temperature. If temperatures are quite low it's just going to struggle it's going to grow much more slowly. Basically with most plants the warmer the temperature the faster the chemical reactions can occur within the plants and it's the chemical reactions which create the sugars basically the photosynthesis and the production of carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and sunlight so the higher the temperature the faster these processes can occur in the plant and it's especially important with a plant like a ZZ plant which is from a tropical region so it's used to growing in warm conditions if it's going to cool house temperatures only around 20 degrees or less it's going to really slow down its metabolic rate and grow much more slowly so if you can increase the temperature ideally you want it around 30 degrees for maximum growth now this is a lot hotter than most people's houses would probably be but the warmer the temperature you can give it the faster its metabolism will be and the faster it can grow so 30 degrees is the optimum but that is quite hard in a household environment unless you like a really warm house so just give it the warmest conditions you can and that will help improve its growth rate. So that's all the things that you need to think about for increasing the growth of the plant. I'll just highlight them all again just to reiterate them. The plant needs plenty of light to carry out photosynthesis it also needs higher temperatures to increase its metabolic rate it needs to be well watered to make sure that it can transpire and it can absorb that carbon dioxide from the atmosphere it also needs a high nitrogen feed to give it the nutrition it needs to grow well and it also needs to be in a big enough pot to make sure that it has the space for the roots to grow and to get all that water and nutrients to provide support for the leaves. So that's all from this video hopefully you found it useful and if you're interested about other things about ZZ plants I've got a few more videos on the way.