"Gregory Young" wrote in message
t...
snip
To plant, I get the $25 - $37 Agway heavy plastic (feels almost like
rubber)
barrels that are 3 feet in diameter, and about 8 inches or so deep.
I dig out a hole in the clay floor of the pond, near the edge, and use the
clay excavated to fill the barrel, to 1 inch from the top of the barrel.
(I fill it part way, then drag it into the water for buoyancy to offset
its
weight a bit, then fill as above. I could never move a fully filled wet
clay
containing barrel of this size otherwise!)
Then I "plant" the tuber on the surface, (basically laying a flat stone of
top of it, so it doesn't float away), then drag the barrel into the hole .
When done the pot is 2 inches under water, maximum.
The lotuses grow like crazy, and bloom profusely (except last year the
blooms had a one day life span due to Japanese beetles!).
All the barrels are round (don't plant lotus in square pots, no matter
what
kind of pond you have, as the square edges can "pinch" the growing tip of
the tuber, which always seems to find that corner to get wedged in.
The other advantage of shallow depth is that I can catch the running tuber
when it jumps the pot edges, which is a yearly event, and put it back into
the pot, or as I had to do last year, cut it, as there was no room left...

I just got 2 healthy tubers from a friend, and they actually look like 4
stuck together in pairs...Can you recommend a safe way to divide them?

BV.