I mentioned sometime earlier about my lotus I wanted to "re-pot", ie put in new growing medium because it had been neglected for years. The only thing was that it wouldn't go dormant. So finally I decided to slowly withdraw the water and force it into dormancy.
Upshot was that although it didn't like it, there was no hint of dormancy. After sitting some time in only damp soil I eventually lost patience and washed the soil away.
This one was grown from seed so I'd never seen the root system before. Turns out there are two plants (sort of). But there are no tubers. Just 'runners' with nodes where roots sprout and leaf stalks arise. These runners branch and at the ends it looks like new leaves are developing.
In a bit of a panic I put the plant into the large ornamental urn I was preparing for them and covered them with about 100mm of water. I'll let the water level rise slowly.
In the evening I washed out the rest of the lotus in the bath tub and took some photos of it. This is going into a plastic tub with a rich growing medium. It'll be easier to move from this later on when I build a larger pond for it.
The photo is of the washed root system.
Problematic lotus
It's been a fortnight since I replanted the lotus.
The piece shown in the photo above has really taken off, 5 leaves opened out (floating), 4 unrolling on the surface, and one just under the water surface.
The one in the ornamental urn only has one leaf just starting to break the water surface.
Overall, a good sign since we're still around the middle of winter. The photo is of the same one as in the photo above +2 weeks.
Did you put the lotus in a larger pot, that you then sank down into a pond or pot? Or did you just plant it directly into the pot/pond?
The ornamental urn has the lotus just planted straight into it. The other (pictured) is in a plastic container that can be moved into or out of a (yet to be constructed). pond.
May I ask, what planting medium to you use for a lotus? Is it regular topsoil, a special product you purchase ... ? When I bought my lotus, it already had some sort of dirt/medium in the container, and they told me to just put the entire pot into my pond, which I did. But I'm curious what that "dirt"/medium is. Thanks much!
It's my own mix, ordinary soil with a little powdered charcoal, cracker dust (rock dust), compost, broken down manure and (believe it or not) some pelletised organic mango fertiliser. And that has clay mixed into it as well. But I don't know what they use commercially.
