Tropical Water Lotus Plant

I watched a few videos before transplanting my lotus plant...



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cSo26w2Pfo
https://www.liveaquaria.com/article/140/?aid=140
http://pond-passion.blogspot.com/2012/03/transplant-your-lotus-now.html

I was very excited to see "Pond Passion" blog on Blogger and felt instantly connected.  The fact of the matter is, this post was from 2012!  The same information, no matter what year it is, but there are no continuous posts.   

Since I started this blog, every single Thai person I've spoken with said, "What do you mean, you are doing it yourself?"  They all laughed at me for working so hard alone, and told me that Thai people don't tend their own gardens.   

The last post was about trying to clean out my Lotus plant.  I tried putting it into a pot located under a shade Bayan Tree, and I found out (with a lot of trial and error), it didn't like being in the shade most of the day.  I've tried other flowers, but the sun was too much for them.  I decided to clean out this pot, buy another plant, and repot it with what ever might still be actually growing in the shaded pot.  Then I set it up on the porch for sunshine and rain.  

The old style I tried:

  But after trying to follow directions in the videos, and attempting to clean the slime out, my new flowers were acting like the same.  Starting to shrivel up, made me take action for repotting.


I used the same pot, cleaned out the slime, and located it onto my front porch... where the sun shines all day long.  I think keeping the water to the top and allowing the sun to shine on it, will help it become healthy.


This photo is after four days of being re-potted.

Before adding water this morning, those baby sprouts were prevalent and growing.  The water covers the leaves now, but everything is healthy.  In fact, I should have taken a picture as soon as I was home from work today, because a flower was definitely open.  That makes me want to make sure you understand that Lotus flowers open in the morning and close every sunset. How romantic~

 

Water Lotus Plant

I thought this would be an easy one to grow....

Not so~

Should this pot be in the shade at all?  Should it need watering daily? Am I supposed to do something else with this plant other than putting it in water? Why did it all turn to mush?

Initially, there was only mud at the bottom of the container when I bought it, and put it into this nice flower garden pot on a pedestal.   I placed it under the Bayan tree that is in the front corner of my lot where I created a corner shade garden. 

Even though you can visually see four other plants living and growing around my water lotus, the lotus turned to slime with mostly mud under it and a green carpet of mossy slime on top. 

So when I went to clean it out, I found this growing...
                                                            

   Doesn't look too small here, but when you look at the next  photo of the whole pot, you'll see how tickled I was to see it sprouting out and made me what to save it. 

Look at the details in the following video of the layer of slime (mossy slime) with mud underneath. Way more mud than when I bought the plant to begin with.  In fact, there was only about three inches of mud when I transplanted it into this garden pot. 

The water was kept high, wasn't in bright sunlight all day, yet the leaves and flowers kept wilting, dying off without sprouting new flowers.  I really didn't understand until I bought a new pot of fresh water lotus and kept it in the sun all day.  I really think my trouble with it was being in a shade garden all day long!

I kept the slimy moss and put it in a location that could use the nutrients from it, then slopped the mud around the plants in the shade garden.  They definitely could use some fresh mud nutrients. 

What I found out after buying new top soil into the shade garden was the soil was so poorly made and bagged up that what was left now was nothing but dust.  The poor plants were not getting any kind of nutrients from the topsoil I purchased.  The neighbor (who has wonderful flowers, bushes and trees) explained in very broken English and digging up old dirt that the new topsoil was not the Thai soil these plants were use to.  Aha~  that now made sense as to why my big beautiful purple-flowering bush was struggling to stay alive. 

More to come on that one~