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 Craig Presnell Photo |
Patti Yager, a member of our email discussion list from Arkansas, asked the group for "information on feeding tropical waterlily seedlings. Mine are in 4" pots with 2" of water over them and 2" leaves. I'd like to see them flower before moving up to larger pots so I know which ones to keep." Our response, along with those of several experienced growers, was:
Kit & Ben Knotts, Cocoa Beach FL:
We personally give 1 Pondtabb to a 4" pot when we plant
(or the equivalent in "crumbs" if we have leftovers
at the bottom of a box -- we buy LOTS of Pondtabbs!)
David Curtright, Escondido, CA:
You can feed them with fragments of Gro-power tablets or Pondtabbs,
or some other good tablet fertilizer. Break a piece off of the
tablet, and I always use Gro-Power (12-8-8), and stick it into
the mud under the plant. Make sure to seal the hole with sand
or mud, and the plant will very soon show its appreciation by
growing like gangbusters. Larger tablet pieces can be used as
the plant grows. Blooms can be forced once the plant is well
developed by using Gro-Power (3-12-12), although this is usually
not necessary. I, too have seedlings, about 1000 of them in a
3 gallon pot. As they grow, I remove the larger plants and move
them up to 2", then to 4" pots.
Craig Presnell, Delray Beach, FL:
I sprout all my seed in jars and once the seedlings get the first
or second leaf past the filiform and a sturdy root, I transplant
them to a four inch pot that has a thin layer of peat at the
bottom, a 'pinch' of generic 14-14-14 time release fertilizer
and then good old Florida top soil, aka...sand. The pots sit
in full sun and
approx. 8" of water with constant flow from a well that
produces 72 F water year round. The pots I use have holes so
that the roots can escape and feed in the mulm. That way the
seedlings invariably bloom without my having to worry about feeding
them again.
I should mention that I can do it like this because I only plant seedlings from germinations with low success rates. I'm always looking for something different in my seedlings and I've found that if I were to get 1,000 sprouts from, say, 'Anne Emmet', I'm stuck with hundreds of "Faux Anne Emmets". So I toss out the sprouts from high germination crosses and plant out those from pods yielding 20 or fewer seeds. It is the small yields that have produced my favorite lilies.