Transplanting

My plan for getting the lotus plant out of its one-gallon pail was to turn the pail upside-down onto the palm of my hand (well, actually, a helper's larger hand), and I expected the mud to run out so that I'd be left with a tangle of leaves, fragile tubers, and roots on my palm; then I hoped to carefully turn all this right-side-up and deposit it on the soil in the tub. It was at this point that I expected things to break, fall off, and who knows what else. Well, none of this happened. Using another plant, I took thefollowing photos to show how easy it all was.

When planting the sprouted seeds, I ran out of one-gallon pails, and resorted to a cut-down milk jug for the fifth sprout. The photo on the left shows how it looked some eight months later. I began by draining off the water and cutting the plastic walls of the jug down to soil level, as in the photo below.

Then, using my helper's larger hand, we inverted the plant and lifted off the remains of the plastic jug. This was where I got my big surprise, since the root ball remained intact instead of falling apart. It was easy, then, to simply turn the whole thing right side up and place it in its new container.

But before doing that, I took some close-ups of the underground jungle, focusing on the new leaf forming at the upper right corner of the root ball (looks like a skinny, straight white finger).