Planting a Lotus Bed

Today we're establishing a lotus bed in our vegetable garden. Now in the U.S. most people grow lotus for the beautiful flowers but gardeners across the world know that lotus is actually quite edible. In Asia it's used widely both for the rhizomes as well as the seeds. The flowers and the leaves are also edible. You might have seen the very recognizable form of lotus root in an Asian dish has a distinctive pattern of holes which is the length of the rhizome of their air chambers inside that rhizome. So when you cut across it you could see all the openings. The seed heads are also very unique. I took these out of a dried flower arrangement. The seed pods are quite popular for dried flowers and if you look over here at the flower you can see that this is the central portion of that flower. As it develops it'll grow and eventually as it dries harden into this pod. The seeds are inside of here and they are remarkably long-lived. Seeds that are over 2,000 years old have been successfully germinated but to do that you have to file them down which is called scarifying and that allows the seed to germinate. If you harvest these seeds before they mature they make a wonderful edible food. They're popular in Asian markets. You can see they're not brown. They're not as dried when they're harvested and last night I experimented a little and made some roasted lotus seeds with a curry powder seasoning. Actually quite tasty and nutritious but today we want to plant and so to start with in nature lotus grow at the edges of wetlands and so they need a nice soggy muddy soil. You can establish a bed for your lotus or you could create that environment within a large container like a whiskey barrel that has a liner in it but you don't want to mix your lotus with your water lilies and other water gardening plants because these guys are really aggressive and will spread throughout the bed. So our bed is 10 feet by 5 feet and we've lined it with a pond liner a very thick liner and also underneath we put a geotextile cloth just to protect that liner. Now the soil is important. This is the the time when we get to use the worst soils we have available. We want a nice heavy clay or loam soil with very little organic matter. The organic matter when it sits in water decomposes and contributes to algae problems. So if you have some horrible clay you dug out of an area or maybe even visit a construction site and get some clay soil use that in your bed and we have a layer that is about eight inches. If you're working in a container you want at least six to eight inches of soil in the bottom and the next step before we plant is actually want to moisten this. We're going to plant right into some wet soil so we we don't want to fill the pond yet but we want to put enough water that we have some mud in here to work with. So our soil is fairly muddy. You can see I'm digging in with my feet. What I want to do is dig some trenches where I'm going to lay the the rhizomes into the soil and we don't really need to put them very deep. It's interesting there are several ways you could plant lotus. The most common way is to order rhizomes in the dormant state and they're typically shipped in the early spring up through about April at which point they start to break dormancy and they're no longer shipped because they're fairly fragile. I talked about starting from seed which is another option. Less often you can start with plants like we have here and this plant doesn't actually have a thick developed rhizome on it. It's been removed but I want to be very careful with it and just gently spread it out. You can see how there's a number of little plantlets with roots and I want to just set those very shallow in my trench and I tried to design this. These plants spread very rapidly so I'm laying these out in a way that they can spread and fill out this bed before too long. Now looking at the end, the very end, this is the growing point of the plant right here. We don't want that to be under the soil. We want to make sure that's above the soil so I'm going to put that at the very end and actually I want to turn it a little. I'd like to point that piece out not so that it's growing into a wall but that it's facing out into the rest of the bed. So I'll give it a new little trench and go ahead and place it up with that growing point up so that's going to give it a lot of freedom to move and we don't want a lot of soil on here just enough to hold it in place. They're fairly buoyant especially when you work with the fresh rhizomes. All those air chambers allow for flotation so we want to be careful with them. We also don't want to cut these leaves. There's a few dead leaves you can see but it's recommended to cut those above the water surface so that they don't rot and so I'm going to wait until we fill the pond up to go ahead and cut those off later. Now if you find that you've put your plants in place and you fill up with water and they're floating you can use rocks and this is a little bit more important when you're working with the rhizome because of those air chambers and you just want to gently set a rock over that rhizome or over the shoot to hold it down and as the roots grow it'll secure it into the mud. Now there are only two species in the genus of the lotus family the Nalumbo and this one with its yellow flower is our native species. This is Nalumbo lutea. The one more commonly grown for an edible is going to be the Asian species but both are edible and in fact Native Americans would have used this plant as a food source. Now most commonly when a plant is used for production it's grown as an annual but we're going to go ahead and grow this as a perennial and I want to be real careful. I'm kind of entwined but I don't want to damage these growing points on the plant. You can see this one's a little bit larger and quite entwined. It's growing in a circle in its container so just work slowly in untwining your plant. Again as I lay this piece in my trench I want to keep that growing tip up out of the soil and just put enough on here to hold it in place. I don't want to bury it too deep. If you need rocks you'll notice more when you're finished if you need rocks. The other thing I'm trying to do is pull the leaves up so that they're not being buried in the soil and I got my flower all muddy but we'll wash that off when we come back in and fill this up. Okay so now that the plant is all laid out we can go ahead and fill this up with water. We want to fill to a depth of about at least four inches above the stems. They can actually live in water depths up to about 18 inches. In the wild you might find them three feet deep in the water but in the landscape 8 to 12 inches is probably an ideal depth. I'm also gonna do a little bit of rinsing. Lotus leaves wash pretty well. They're designed to keep the water off and as it fills I'll come in and lift these up above the water. At this time we don't want to put any fertilizers on the plant but they will be heavy feeders as they grow.