Planting containers, sand, water plants

Spring is coming and it is time to prepare for sowing and planting new plants. Old ones are holding very well for now, although it doesn`t mean anything. Plants can sometimes survive the entire winter and then die in the spring; probably from exhaustion.

Spring sometimes also represent time when people spend money on planting containers that are usually used for short period of time: for growing seedlings. It is much cheaper to use what you have at home and make you own containers. I used aluminum foil, sticky tape and a box as a mold. This is the result:

Using a sterile sand is a good idea for seed germination but it doesn't mean that you have to buy it. I used  ordinary construction sand and sterilized it myself. I lit the fire in the stow that we use for wax melting and jam making, warped the sand in aluminum foil and hour or two later the sand was sterile :). Just be careful with the sand because it stays very hot for a long time after you stop heating it. I burned my fingers 2 times :).

Lotus that was planted last year (end of the summer) has survived the winter in a basement. The most important thing is that water doesn't freeze during the winter. Few days ago I took lotuses out of the basement to change the stale stinky water and examine the plants and I was pleasantly surprised to see that they look healthy and one of them is developing its first leaf. Many web pages write that lotus will not grow until water is warm...but it seems that is not very strict rule.

In the second half of the March I will open Lotus diary where I will write about growing lotus from seed. The ones below are grown from the seed and they should have a red flower (according to the seller). This spring I`ll plant blue and white.   

More tropical and sensitive plants were in the house where it is warm. Water lettuce (Pistia stratiotes) is much hardier than water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) but they both survived. 

Water lettuce is successfully overwintering indoors for few years now. Water hyacinth I had many years ago and it didn't survive since then I badly wanted to have them because they are very interesting and nice. A friend of mine found few of hyacinths in a shopping center and when they grew bigger and multiplied I got few of them. During the summer they grew very well but when winter came only the strongest survived. With the help of MH light bulb and sunny January for now several of them are still alive and developing new leafs.Those plants that had only two or one leaf started to develop new ones after I began to use MH bulb. They are very small but who knows, maybe they survive.

Water lettuce:

Water hyacinth: