How to Grow a Lotus Plant

Wednesday, 14 August 2013

Here's a blog post that i should have published back in 2012.  I had started writing it over a year ago and never got around to finishing it.  So i figured that i might as well finish writing it and post it now.

Firstly here's the links to me making the pond and growing the banana tree:
Homemade Concrete Pond and Waterfall 
Grow a Banana Tree in Cold Climate

Before i could put the lotus plants outside i started them indoors.  I used a 5 gallon fish tank with a filter, air pump, heater and light.  The hotter the better, lotus plants seem to grow best when the temperature is near 90 degrees.

This is what the first leaves in fish tank looked like.

Then back in March of 2012 the weather got really nice and temperatures went up to 75 degrees. So i figured it would be a perfect time to move all of my plants outside. I had 3 buckets of mud and water in the basement with my lotus tubers in them. My banana tree was growing slowly in my dining room all year and i had a new bamboo tree that was growing great in my indoor greenhouse.

Here's everything moved outside.


I refilled the buckets that had been sitting in the basements.


This is where i left them off last year, in the basement:  Keep Dormant Lotus Lilly Pad Plant

I think the reason why i never finished writing this blog post is because of what happened that year.  When i moved the buckets from the basement to the backyard, the plants started started sending up leaves when it got warm, but then got really cold and they died.  Luckily the lotus plants survived but the banana tree wasn't as lucky. 

It later warmed up into the 70's and i started seeing small leaves again.

So it was at this point that they were ready to put into the pond.  I took my time digging out lotus tubers, but i still broke some. it was really muddy and the tubers are super delicate.

In the process some of the leaves broke off from the roots and died

But here's what it looked like with them all transplanted into their own buckets.  I added stone on top to keep down the mud.  This was still back in 2012 when Karrie and i had just finished painting the pond blue.  It looked great then with the clean water.

And last year everything turned out great.  The lotus's grew well in their own buckets and having room in the pond for them to spread out their leaves helped.  They weren't confined to the small buckets and were able to send up aerial leaves.

Like before the hotter the better, when it got up to 90 degrees they were growing fast.  Then one day i went out side to look at the plants and saw this.

I remember reading how the first flower always comes up really close to a main leaf. That's exactly how it was growing, about 2 inches from one of the largest aerial leaves.  Then this is a few weeks later, it sent up another flower from the same plant.

Here's what it looked like opened up, probably 8" across.

This was just a grasshopper that landed on it one day.

After all the petals of the flower fell off, the center of the flower continued to grow.  This is the seed pod that i found back in the very beginning.

The bummer news is that this past winter i took those 3 buckets and put them in the basement.  I tried my best to keep them wet but they ended up drying out.  Actually some time in the middle of February they sent up shoots, but then died.  I was hoping that i could just put them back in the pond this year, but it seems like they didn't make it.  

I guess that i'll have to start them from a seed every year, or else find a better method for keeping them alive.  Maybe i'll just leave them in the pond and hope they don't freeze solid.

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Final Lotus of the Year

Wednesday, 9 November 2011

Well as of right now the lotus plants are in the basement for the winter.

I didn't want the roots to freeze so i brought them inside. When it warms up enough in the spring i'll take them back out.
Here's what i have previously written about trying to grow them:
Sprouting Lotus Seeds
Lotus Update
Lotus in the Sun

Anyway going back a few months ... I was down near the Ohio border again for work and saw the lotus fields. Here they are in August, in a channel off of Lake Erie.
A view of all the lotus beds.
There were millions of them.
The view from the causeway.
A view of one of the rivers near a power plant to the north, flowing into Lake Erie.
Here's what the area looks like from above. The water is Lake Erie, the highway is I-75.
Back at my house the hot 90 degree summer days really made them grow big. The sun, heat and humidity outside caused them to take off. Here was one of my first aerial leaves before it opened up.
There were around four aerial leaves per pot.
The lotus effect on the leaf.

Some close-ups.

Back down near Monroe, Michigan i found a place where you can see them up close. It's visible from I-75 but you have to loop around to get there.

The leaves there grew much bigger then the ones in my backyard.
The seed pods which grew from the center of the flower.
By this time a lot of the seed pods had turned brown.
A couple of them broke off their stalks.
But there was a ton of them. If you figure that each seed pod has around 20 seeds on average, you can see how many seeds are here.

Although like i said earlier, seeds aren't the main way that these grow. They spread from the tubers in the mud, like how grass in your yard spreads.
Here they are in September. The leaves are turning brown and starting to go dormant.
The ones in Monroe had already turned brown.
This is right before i cut the leaves off, drained the water and moved them to the basement.
I'm expecting great things next spring. Hopefully all the energy is stored up in the tubers and will cause the plant to shoot up bigger then they grew from a seed this year.

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