How Long Does It Take For Water Lilies To Grow

Care Of Water Lilies: Growing Water Lilies And Water Lily Care

By: Jackie Carroll

H2o lilies (Nymphaea spp.) are the perfect finishing touches for a garden pool or pond, adding practicality also as beauty to a water feature. Fish use them as hiding places to escape predators, and as shady retreats from the hot summertime dominicus. Plants growing in a pond assistance keep the h2o clean and aerated, and so you'll spend less fourth dimension on pond maintenance. Let's take a look at how to grow a water lily.

H2o lily plants can be divided into two types:

Hardy – Hardy types are best for northern climates where the water freezes in winter. Every bit long as the roots of hardy specimens are below the level where the water freezes, they will reappear the following leap.
Tropical – Tropical water lilies won't survive in cold water and must exist brought indoors for winter in all but the warmest areas. Many growers treat them as annuals, replanting them each year. Otherwise, remove them from the swimming, make clean them up, and store them in a bucket of moist sand in a cool basement before the first freeze. Tropical water lily plants can be farther divided into ii groups: solar day bloomers and dark bloomers. White night bloomers wait spectacular with nil more than moonlight to illuminate them, but blues, purples, reds, and pinks are very difficult to run across in the nighttime. Avert these colors unless the pond is illuminated by bogus light at nighttime.

How to Grow a Water Lily

A swimming or pool covered in h2o lilies is attractive, but complete coverage prevents light from penetrating into the water, choking out other plant and creature life. Growing water lilies in containers helps keep them from spreading and taking over a small-scale pond and information technology makes h2o lily care much easier.

When you are growing water lilies, use a large plastic pot with several holes punched in the sides and bottom. Fill the pot to inside 3 inches (8 cm.) of the top with silt, loam, or clay soil and mix in a small-scale amount of ho-hum-release fertilizer labeled for apply with aquatic soil.

Institute the rhizome close to one side of the pot at a 45-degree angle with the eye pointing up. Cover the soil with a layer of pea gravel, keeping the gravel away from the pinnacle of the rhizome as much as possible. The gravel keeps the soil from floating off or washing out of the pot.

Place the pot in the lesser of the pond, adjusting the depth to that recommended for your specific variety. Well-nigh call for a depth of between half-dozen and eighteen inches (xv-46 cm.). If necessary, y'all can raise the depth past placing the pot on top of rocks.

Annotation: For those having fish in their water garden, water lilies should Non be potted in regular potting soil, as this contains a lot of organic fabric that volition eventually rot and foul the water. Remove any rotting organic material from your pond or water garden, every bit this is a convenance ground for anaerobic bacteria and pathogens and may add unwanted backlog nutrients to feed algae blooms. Instead, pot h2o lilies, and any other swimming establish, in a heavy clay soil and cover with fist sized rock, and then river rock to forbid fish from rooting around in the pot and sending the planting medium into the swimming. A few simple preventative steps up front are far easier to take than trying to treat sick and dying fish later.

H2o Lily Care

Once planted, taking care of water lilies is easy. In fact, most require no care at all other than dividing them every iii or four years to rejuvenate them and to keep them from spreading into unwanted areas.

This commodity was final updated on 05/17/21