Water Gardening: Lotus in the garage?, 1 by tsg

tsg wrote:
I have worked with Lotus plants grown commercially. As long as the tuber is below the freezing zone they will survive. They will stay dormant until the water warms up .Different varieties come out of this at different times.The plant will develope growing tips during the dormant stage but the tips will not start to grow more until the temperture warms enough.During the dormant stage is when you pick your tubers and divide them to start more plants.I would right after your last frost date. This will insure you have the growing tips .We used a water hose or a water pump to blow the mud away with little or no disturbance of the growing tips.You should have 2 sections or segments with growing tips when you divide them. We just cut them this way because some of the runners were 10 feet long or so. There are several different theories going around about planting them but we always made a trench in the soil and placed the tuber in that and covered it with dirt except the facing upward tips. You can anchor the tuber down but we never had to because we never had much movement in our growing ponds.