Sprouting Lotus Seeds

Wednesday, 12 January 2011

To start with, i recently read this article about the American Lotus spreading near Detroit.Lotus in Detroit
"The American lotus is threatened in Michigan, and there is a fine as high as $500 for picking it, according to the state Department of Natural Resources."

Just so everyone including the DNR is clear, i didn't pick any plants. I merely "gathered" some seeds from the floating seed pods. Plus that law is ridiculous.

How can a plant be "threatened" in Michigan but in other states be a nuisance species. That's like saying penguin's are endangered here in the US. Or that cow's are threatened in Siberia. It's not like this is the last pocket of the species on Earth being killed off by people. Down south the lotus is taking over entire rivers.

It's threatened in Michigan because it's cold here. The water needs to be clean and warm for them to grow, 99% of the time Lake Erie is neither of those two things. Like i said earlier i found it near the Consumers Energy power plant water discharge pipes. If the plant wasn't discharging warm water constantly the lotus plants would probably die.

With that said, here's how the Lotus seeds are looking so far.

The ones on the left are some original dry seeds (that i "gathered") and the ones on the right are the seeds that i sanded the shell and have been soaking in warm water for 5 days. I put the cup of water sitting on a heat vent to make sure it stayed warm. Notice how much they have swelled up with water from their original size.
Three days ago i removed the shell from two more seeds. One seed i removed the outer shell only. The other seed i cracked completely in half.
It turns out that completely removing the shell is the way to go. That seed sprouted after only 3 days. It took the seeds with the partially sanded shells 6 days for the first one to sprout. So removing more of the shell means faster sprouting. It must be because removing the entire shell allows for more water to be absorbed faster.

Here's what the seed looked like after 3 days, compared to 5 days for the other seeds.
I sprouted these seeds in a wet paper towel in a zip-lock bag rather then in a cup of water.
Not surprisingly the lotus grows best in swampy, organic, muddy clay soil. I was going to use kitty litter because it is primarily clay. But i ended up using soil from my back yard, which is mostly clay with a little bit of top soil.

I bought 4 pots from Home Depot the other day. They were in the back corner of the store and due to a clearance pricing mistake, 2 of them cost only 1 cent each. Totally legit.
Here's pictures of the lotus planted 1 inch deep in mud in about 3 inches of water.
Here they are after day 10 or so. They are still growing as long as i don't let them dry out. After reaching the surface they started to dry out so i covered the pot with saran wrap. I'll definitely "juice 'um" with some fertilizer to get them growing big.

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American Lotus

Thursday, 6 January 2011

A few months ago i was working down at the coal burning Consumers Energy power plant near the Michigan-Ohio border. They are actually just north of North Maumee Bay and use the lakes water for cooling.
There's lots of weeds, cattails and other plants in the protected cove. The power plant also has a huge net and "fish trap" to keep their pipes clear of debris. One day i saw thousands and thousands of little 4" fish, shad i think, that had completely filled the hanging metal basket.

In September i was there and in the bay there were these huge lillypads, they looked to be 3 feet in diameter. You can see that they took up half the channel.
I took this picture with my cell phone. In early November, that month the fog seemed to stay there every morning.

Later in the year around November, all of the lillypads were gone and these brown, round floating things with seeds in them were in their place...and lots of trash because it's Lake Erie.
At the time i wasn't sure exactly what they were but i liked them and brought home a handful of seeds. I found out later that the plant and seed pod were from the American Lotus.

I then read that:

• It's the only native lotus species to the U.S. and Canada

• Native Americans used to eat the seeds and rhizomes (roots)

• The plant is a good "indicator" species and only grows in clean water. They also like the warmer waters around places like power plant discharge pipes. Turns out that the Consumer Energy power plant is actually one of the places that Monroe's Lotus Garden Club (how much do i NOT want to hang out with that group) visits each year.

• Lillypads can be 1ft - 3ft in diameter

• The white and yellow flower can be 10" in diameter

• In Michigan it is listed as a "threatened" plant, it's "endangered" in some states, and Connecticut has it on their "invasive plant list" because of it's ability to crowd out other plant species. I can see why from this picture taken somewhere down south.

I also learned that lotus seeds have special enzymes, which allow them to last for hundreds and even thousands of years. In Tokyo they found seeds that were buried deep in mud and carbon dating showed that they were over 2,000 years old. The scientists planted them and they grew.

The only trick is that lotus seeds need to have their shell scarified, or roughened up. If the outer shell is not rubbed or cracked in some way nothing will happen.

So here's a few of the seeds i found.
Here's what they looked like after i filed through the outer shell.
I tried growing them in 2 different ways. The first was by placing them in a wet paper towel then putting that in a plastic zip-lock bag. I laid the bag over a heat vent to get it nice and warm.

The second way was to simply drop them in a cup of warm water. You can see two of the seeds floated and probably won't grow.
We'll see how they turn out. After two days i haven't seen any change.

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