The "Unkillable" ZZ Plant: Complete Zamioculcas Care Guide

What's up everyone? Okay, so if there's a plant that you want to grow but you kill everything that you've ever touched, this is the plant for you. It's the ZZ plant, Zamiococcus zamifolia. Hands down it's going to be the easiest houseplant you've ever grown in your entire life. You have to try to kill it. I mean, the only way you're going to fail is if you just chop it in half and then laugh as it dies. That's the only way you're going to ever get this thing to die. So stay tuned. We're going to get into how to grow the unkillable ZZ plant. So first of all, let's get into the appearance. One of the first things you're going to notice is how shiny these leaves are. So for a long time, this was a popular plant in malls, museums, et cetera, cause it almost looks fake. It looks like a plant that isn't real and honestly with how easy it is to care for, it might as well be a fake plant because you practically have to do almost nothing to make sure that this stays alive. So let's go ahead and get into the soil requirements. What you're going to notice right here is the ZZ plant has these bulbs and these bulbs actually hold quite a bit of moisture in them. And so what that means is that like most house plants, it doesn't want to be over watered. But because of these bulbs here, it wants to be watered even less than the average house plant. And so a good rule of thumb is to make sure that the soil is dry to about two inches deep. So what you'll do is you'll put in your finger just about two inches deep, see if there's any moisture at that level. And if there is not, then yeah, go ahead and give it a water, but don't get crazy with it. And make sure that you've got, of course, a drainage pot or drainage hole on the bottom. And the soil mix you're using, you may want to use something a little bit more well draining than standard potting mix. In here, I have maybe a 75% blend of potting mix, and then a 25% blend of cactus mix. And that's because I'm trying to counteract for the fact that these hold onto so much moisture and the ZZ plant in general doesn't want to be watered too, too heavily. Now, when we're talking about placement in a room, you want bright indirect light. And what that means is you want it to be six to seven feet away from a windowsill that is getting a good amount of light in a day. And so this is all you want. You do not want it to be, boom, right there on that windowsill, especially if that windowsill is getting a lot of light. The ZZ plant does not like direct light and the leaves are going to have a bit of a hard time if you give it that. At the same time though, if you were to place this in an area that got not a lot of light at all, well, then you're going to have an even harder time as the plant will like to really droop down very, very far and look a bit sickly if you do that. So don't do that either. Find that happy middle ground where it's not too close to the windowsill, not too far away. All right. One thing I would recommend is the way that you place your plant matters. So as you can see, my plant is curving this way. And that's because up in my room where I keep this plant normally, I have it on a plant stand that's sort of slanted against a wall. And then the plant is placed like this and the light source is coming in from over here. And so over the last six, seven months that I've had this plant, it has slowly said, okay, that's where the light is. That's where I'm going to grow. And one thing you can do is slowly rotate it over the course of months. Maybe every fourth, fifth time you water, turn it 20, uh, turn it 25%, right? And then turn it 25%, turn it again, turn it again. Eventually you're going to get a nice straight growing one. And if, you know, you kind of don't have a point source and you have a top down source, well then you really don't need to worry about this. Your plant's going to grow straight up and it won't be a problem at all. Another beautiful thing about the ZZ plant is that, uh, it really doesn't have any pest or disease problems. So I don't know about you. My, uh, I have a bird's nest fern right now that has been suffering for some scale. Uh, the ZZ plant doesn't really have that problem. Sure you might get the random scale here and there. Hit it with some neem oil, you will have no problems at all. But in general, I'm not sure what it is within the plant itself, but it's just not an attractive houseplant for pests. The classic aphids, white flies, et cetera, don't really affect it. And then disease wise as well, the only problem you're going to run into as I block my face with this, kind of like in the ZZ jungle here, the only problem you're going to run into is the fact that if you overwater, so if you soak this completely and it's not well draining and maybe the soil itself has maybe some peat moss or some coconut coir, it holds too much moisture. Well then yeah, these little bulbs and the roots themselves are going to be prone to root rot and the various fungal pathogens that come along with that. So just don't overwater. Disease and pest wise, not a whole lot to worry about here. Now, when it comes to propagating the ZZ plant, to be honest, it's possible, but I wouldn't recommend it. And mostly that's because it's an extremely slow plant to root after a cutting propagation. So again, the way you do it though is you would take a standard stem cutting, maybe take off the lower two leaves. You could even scrape a little bit of the plant tissue away if you wanted to, you don't have to. Maybe use some rooting hormone and then plop that in soil. But it's going to take months and months for that to establish itself because the plant itself, once it roots, it's a pretty quick grower, if given the right environment. But to establish roots, it can take months and sometimes years to really start to take off. So while you can propagate it with the classic stem cutting method, I really wouldn't recommend it. You might as well just buy an established plant and if you really like it, just buy another plant. They're not that expensive and you will shortcut years of slow growth. All right, there we have it. Easiest plant in the world to take care of. It is the one that I don't have to worry about the most in my little plant stand here. See if you can name some of those, by the way, there's some really cool ones there. And I'll be doing probably a video on every single one of these at some point in time. So thanks so much for everyone who is commenting on these videos. I really appreciate it. Just letting me know what you want to hear more about. Hydroponics, houseplants, succulents. I'm trying to do enough of all of them so that everyone's interested, but not so many of one type in a row that people are like, eh, come on and get to the microgreens or get to the hydroponics or whatever. So coming up shortly, there's going to be some more hydroponic stuff. There's going to be some planting guides for some vegetables cause I'm doing a lot more of that. And then there's going to be a pretty big video, uh, that's going to take me some time because I'm doing an entire front yard restoration on my friend's terraced yard. So we're going to do succulents, we're going to do edibles and then we're going to do a bank of wildflowers as well. It's going to look super cool. And it's kind of like the Holy Trinity cause you've got the natural California wildflowers on one side. They're going to be pollinating this whole area. Uh, and then you've got the succulents for nice xeriscaping, low water usage. And then you've got some edibles to actually get some food production out of the system. So it's going to be cool. Stay tuned. If you want to see that type of stuff, uh, whatever you want to see, drop a comment below, like, subscribe. Uh, that's the only way you're going to get to know when these new videos come out. Uh, and if you really, really want to know, if you want to go hardcore mode on me, then there's a bell button that you can click somewhere down there. You just click boop and it'll actually give you a little browser notification. But you know, I don't expect everyone to do that. Uh, I only do that for my absolute favorite channel. So if that's this channel for you, then I would sincerely appreciate it. But until next time, good luck in the garden. Grow that ZZ plant. Grow it. It's easy. Uh, and I'll see you in the next video. Later.