article: Containers of Water Lilies

Containers of Water Lilies

In the water garden, where you place your plants and containers will become important to their continued life and growing process. In this article, I want to tell you more about what I know about where to place certain types of plants in the water garden so your pond area will grow nicely without problems.

Tropical Water Lilies

Water lilies are one of the many plants that you have to choose from for the water garden. There are both day and night blooming water lilies that you can decide to use. Most lilies should be planted in containers to control their growth, and their over taking of your water garden as they can be an aggressive grower. Tropical water lilies should be planted in containers that are at least ten inches across for each plant.

Each plant will need about a two to five gallons of soil, the more mature your plants are the more soil they will require, so you can start with a mid sized container so you don’t have to work with your lilies for a while if you like. Every two years, your lilies will need transplanted with new soil while they are still in the growing stage.

When starting water lilies for the first time, you will be working with tubers. These are small bulb like roots that you will plant in the soil in the container. Place the tubers about two inches from the top of the soil level. The roots will grow down in to the soil to support the plant, and the tuber will not become rotten as it sits in the water, as it will be just below the soil. The tip of the tuber should not be buried in the soil, but allowed to peek out of the soil.

Sand should be added to the top most portion of the container to help keep the soil from floating away. Small amounts of gravel can be added around the edges of the container to help with balance and weight but not should be added to the center of the container, as this is where the lilies will grow up and out of the soil.

Adding fertilizer tablets to the soil will help the roots want to break out and seek the nutrients in the soil. You can put the containers in the water, where the depth is up to twelve inches deep. Water much deeper is going to leave you with hard to work with container plants, and it will allow the lilies to escape the confines of the container spreading through your pond. When first placing the container in the water garden, you should keep the container placement at a level of two to six inches so the plant has a chance to become established before becoming submerged.