Graduation Day!

All five lotuses survived the winter in the greenhouse, although it was a bit of a rollercoaster ride.

First of all, I nearly killed a couple of the plants with a pyrethrin spray; the photo on the right shows the damage. This came about when I noticed the beginnings of a spider mite attack on the leaves, and because I'd had a bad time with these little devils in the greenhouse during the previous season, I immediately grabbed the spray bottle and let them have it. In retrospect, I think it might have been okay if I'd rinsed the spray off after a few minutes, but I let it stay pooled on the leaves, and this was the sad result. Since then, I've simply used my fingers for bug control.

I started fertilizing the plants in October, using a generic aquatic plant fertilizer in tablet form. Used a screwdriver and hammer to break the tablets up into chunks, and pushed about a quarter of a tablet into the center of each container.

Later in the winter, two of the five plants lost all their leaves, and I figured they had kicked the bucket (ha!), but much to my surprise they both bounced back. The other three sort of moped along, producing a few small, anemic leaves. I'm not sure, but suspect this was their response to the short day lengths of the season. Anyway, I quit fertilizing them during this time.

With the return of the sun, all five plants picked up again, producing new leaves on wimpy stalks, and I kept up my spider mite and aphid patrol.

Before placing the plant in the tub, I siphoned off the silty water, added fresh water and siphoned that off, and repeated that several times. The water is still far from clear, even a week later, but I'm going to ignore it for a while, and let the lotus get established before doing another water change. I did put four fertilizer tablets in the soil, hoping this would help make it feel comfortable in its new surroundings.

One of the plants seemed particularly vigorous (photo on the left), and about two weeks ago (late April), I moved it out of the greenhouse, onto the patio. In the meantime, my pond construction had been progressing slowly, but I did install liner in the small upper pond that will feed the waterfall. Having a large chunk of liner left over, I decided to line a large wooden tub and transplant the lotus into it. (Photo below).

I tried to make all the liner folds point in the same direction, to lessen the chance of trapping a growing point in a fold, and filled the tub about half-way with garden soil that's a mix of clay and loam. This picture was taken the next day, and as you can see, there's still an awful lot of silt suspended in the water.

And here's the lotus in its new home! It may not look like much at the moment, but I'm pretty danged happy about it, and can visualize it with vertical leaves, clear water, and a trimmed liner---simply stunning! And who knows, one of these years my baby may even bloom!

This being my first ever attempt to grow lotus, I had agonized over how to get the plant out of its one-gallon pail and into the tub without damaging it. I'd read over and over about how careful one has to be to avoid damaging the brittle, delicate growing point of the tuber, and had actually had a nightmare in which I did indeed break this thing off! But in the event, it turned out to be a piece of cake: check out the next page to see how I did it.