Water Gardening: Baby Lotus Dying?, 3 by wobina

wobina wrote:

Quoting:What size is the planter (dimensions) and the larger container (gallons and dimensions) in which the planter sits? How long have they been in the planter? Or did you plant them directly in the bigger container.

It\'s a 20\"x6\" tub. I don\'t have a pond or any other larger container to put it in. Since this is my first time growing any kind of water plant I just planned on keeping them in containers for now.

Quoting:Do you change the water, and if so, how often?

When they were germinating I changed it multiple times a day, but after transplanting them into the container with the pond soil I\'ve just been refilling the water every 1-2 days as it goes down.

They started smelling horrible, so I started flushing them out every day and even just dumping the water out as much as I could and replacing it with clean water until I was able to get an aerator. The smell went away, but they\'re covered in a sludge now which I think might be algae...

Quoting:How deep are they planted?

There\'s only about an inch of the pond soil in the bottom, they still have their seed husks attached so they kinda keep floating out whenever I bury them.

Quoting:What planting medium did you use? Have you fertilized it at all?

It\'s Aquascape Pond Potting Media for Aquatic Plants. I have some fertilizer tabs, and I\'ve been wanting to use them, but everything I read says don\'t do it until they have aerial leaves. I don\'t want to hurt them so I\'ve been trying to hold off...

Quoting:Lotus generally like to be in a large body of water, planted at least 18-20\" deep, dappled to full sunlight. You can plant them deeper than their current length; they will grow to the surface in a few days.

A lot of stuff I read said to put only 2-3 inches of water and that they are very sensitive to water level changes, so I\'ve been keeping it low... I added some more today though. I also have some more soil I\'m going to add too.

Quoting:After my last pond clean-out (I do every other year), the lotus were inadvertently put on an upper shelf, 10\" deep and they absolutely hated it! They turned a pale green with burned leaves--I thought they were going to die! My pond is on the SW side of my yard in Southern CA and it has been very hot. They might do better up where you are because Fremont is cooler.

Wow! Okay that\'s frustrating because a lot of the articles about raising lotus from seeds kept telling me less water is better because the part of the plant that grows out of the water will be stronger. But my original instinct was that they were getting burned from the sun, so I\'ll definitely try to get them deeper... Maybe buy a deeper container if I have to. This container was marketed specifically for lotuses too. :(

Thank you for your help!