The Story of My Lotus

About six years ago I ordered some lotus seeds (off Ebay, I think) when I lived in Connecticut.  I tried to grow them there, but they withered and died.  So I tucked them away in my seed box to await a more auspicious time.  Well, that time came in April. When I moved from Ct to my present location, I went from rolling in the dough to pretty much broke, but that's another story.  So anyway, I got it in my head to try and grow some lotus again.  It nagged at me.  It haunted my dreams.  I just desperately needed some lotus in my life.
     I looked online to find some and they were ridiculously expensive.  Even the seeds were rather pricey.   So I faintly remembered having some seeds somewhere and rooted around until I found them.  Honestly, I didn't hold out much hope, but hey, at this point, they were free and available.

     So I took the four I had left and googled "how to grow lotus from seed."  They were super hard and dark brown little ovalish-balls that did not look promising.  I sat down on my sidewalk and using a pair of pliers to grip them, scraped them up and down the rough surface of the concrete until I had worn through the hard outer coat.  I did it to all of them and then plunked them in a bowl of water to see what would happen.

I was supposed to change the water every day, but life being busy and relentless, I forgot half the time.  In a few days they sprouted and I had to do the happy dance!  Note on my calendar on Easter Sunday: 

Scratched 4 lotus seeds and soaked in water (3 have sprouted as of 4/12/15)

 

I transferred them to a bucket with all clay kitty litter about an inch deep in the bottom.  In a few more days they looked like this:

 

 

 I was beside my self with excitement--like it was Christmas.  But I reminded myself they still might just keel over and die as sometimes my experiments are apt to do.

But by gosh and by golly, it felt like I had created a miracle!

Six days after Easter Sunday, I planted them.   I  put some garden soil in the bottom of two big brown hole-less containers I bought on sale for 1/2 off at Home Depot for $17 each.  Way too expensive, but I felt I had to give them a good home since I had sprouted them.

We had dug a little pond a few months earlier.  Okay, truth be told, my son had done the backbreaking work of digging a 36' wide by 11' long hole.  I ordered a liner online--the heavyduty kind that last forever and a day.  I missed my huge pond from CT (it had a waterfall and lilies and all sorts of interesting critters and plants living in it) but I didn't have the funds or energy to make a big one.  We wanted to grow pitcher plants and lilies.  My sister split her pitcher plants and gave me some and I ordered 2 water lilies from a place online that was shutting down its mailorder business.  I heard lotus can really spread like crazy and I didn't want them to take over the pond, so I put them in these pots last spring. 

So every day after work, I'd go check and see what was going on in the lotus pots.  At first all I could see were those three thin, green shoot way down at the bottom.  Eventually, they broke the surface and turned into leaves.

 

Every day one more leaf would appear.

 And the pots matched each other leaf for leaf.  I'd put two sprouted seeds in each pot.

This is what they looked like at the end of the summer.  Big green leaves, but no buds or flowers.

When the temperatures dropped, the leaves and stalks turned brown and died.  I figured that was it.  They must have been tropical and only had one season in them.  Then I had my son help me clean out the pots and we found a bunch of live roots and "bulbs" (rhizomes? corms?)in the bottom.  We carefully (sort of ) took them out and but them in a black rigid formed pond a friend had found at the dump and given to us.  Once again my son--he of the strong back--dug a hole for the pond and we sank it 6/8 of the way in the ground.  We added some of our marginal to the little shelf that is built in.  We'll plant creeping jenny around it come spring and make it look less raw!  I hope they make through the winter and bloom this year.