The start of something new.

Nice. I am behind and need to get my WL's fertilized. Perhaps this weekend

The fish ate all of the first leaves, including the floater that was just emerging. Disgusted, I moved it out of the culture tank into one of my tropical nursery tanks (which don't contain fish). I don't know what makes fish, which have never tasted the baby waterlilies before, to one day eat all of one of them.
I'm going to go back to putting screens around my seedlings and starts.

This plant's pretty tough, though, and pumped out new leaves in quick succession. I fertilized it a couple weeks ago. It now has five floaters, and they're getting more and more prickly. I'm going to move it to a sunnier location tomorrow, and decide then whether it should be potted up. No fish yet, though, until all of the leaves have spikes on them. This is the only plant that germinated from my three seeds this spring, and I don't want to lose it.

The textured pads of the euryale from the pot on the right are quite different from those of the tropical water lily in the pot on the left, even at this stage when they're not fully round yet.

Euryale has been transplanted into a 10" pot, and moved to it's own growout tank. I will fertilize it tomorrow, since I like to give the soil a chance to settle for a day before I insert tabs. I will raise the water level slowly over the next couple of days to allow it to cycle (all water is from large, mature ponds, but the dynamic is completely different in a new tank). Fish will go in later in the week--small ones this time, and hopefully wary of the spiky leaves. The plant will get full sun for 8-10 hours/day and remain here until it is ready to be installed in the pond, unless something goes wrong. I also don't plan to move it into a larger pot again, because I really need to dwarf the mature plant to fit in the limited space I can give it.

The leaves are only 5" across or so, although they are getting rounder, and very thorny. I think cool water temperatures have been a factor, as well as the lower light levels in my nursery ponds. In this location, with the small tank, I will have to monitor to make sure it's not getting too hot. I'm looking for 12-15" leaves before I move the plant again, and shooting for 3 foot leaves in its final location.

Leaves are up to 10", but they're "melting", showing signs of too much fertilizer. I'm actually below the recommended levels, but my soil tends to be richer, my sun hotter, and my water has fish, so I need to be careful. I added a bubbler and EE to help take up nutrients and keep the water healthy. There's actually one healthy leaf under the water in this picture, which I repositioned before and after it. The top leaf is the most recent, and looks much better than the bottom left leaf that came before it. If I can get two healthy new leaves, this plant will head to a display pond. Unfortunately, plans changed, and I no longer have the pond it was originally intended for, but I'll work something out.

Interesting that that is from too much fert. I'm envious of the space to have one of those beauties, they are incredible.

I can't say that I really have the space, anymore, but for this one I'll figure something out even if it means I have to dig a temporary pond just for it this year.

Here's the new leaf coming out. Those spines on the outside are sharp, and if you look closely at the inside folds, you'll see the the thorns on the upper side, too. I didn't really want to move it more than one more time because of these, but it's about outgrown the propagation tanks.

I thought about clearing other plants out and putting one in the cattle trough I have on the roof. However, I was afraid those thorns would hurt my fish, I don't have anywhere else to put the fish. There is a hacienda here that has one in an enormous fountain in the front courtyard, impressive!

Two more beautiful leaves, and I've moved the plant into yet another temporary tank. You can see the largest leaf from the previous photo in the lower right corner of this one. Also notice how much bigger that leaf is than the "melted" one at the top, which was almost the same size in the last picture. The leaves reach the surface with crazy thick stems and small surface area, and the proceed to grow larger and larger until after the next leaf is completely out of the water.

The current plan is to dig a temporary shallow pond this week to put the plant in before it outgrows all of my stock tanks.

And picture of the crown, for fun, showing the thick leaf stems.

They are beautiful Paul. I had not seen this plant prior to this thread.

Amazing you having it in a stock tank. How wide will you make the temporary pond? I've seen pictures of one in a bathtub somewhere in S.America, but it was severely pruned. Also the pictures from florida where they have huge ponds for just those lilies. <<<sigh>>>

I'm thinking 100' square, if I can manage it. Maybe a 15'x15' triangle. We'll see. Digging in my ground is done with a pickaxe, and I'm a bit limited for full sun space anyway.

I once saw a setup where someone put in a raised bed type frame, draped that with a liner, and capped it around the edge.

You've got me wondering about my fish. I lost one of my koi in an unrelated demo system today and suddenly I'm feeling more protective of them. Cheap fish are hard to get a hold of this time of year, and I don't know if I want to sacrifice any of my current ones to the Euryale's spikes. I guess I had just assumed they'd be smart of enough to take care of themselves.

I don't know how smart fish are, mine always seem to be a bit slow If they aren't spawning they probably will be fine but when they are spawning they don't pay much attention to other things. I think the smaller the fish the safer they would be, can you put some mosquito fish in there?

Yes, I probably misspoke calling my fish smart. I think the only thing in their little brains is eating. Even that seems to be more reflex than thought. "I just ate something! No, that's not good to eat, I'll spit it out. I just ate something else! No, that's not good to eat, I'll spit it out. Ooh, there's a person--I'm going to eat something! Get out of the way everyone!"

I just though they would navigate around the spikes automatically, but maybe not.

Mosquito fish are tightly controlled here, but I know they're available from mosquito control services. I'll look into that as a possibility.

Of course, I can use tropicals as pond fish here but perhaps you can too if you winter your lilies. I use Mollies and Guppies for mosquito control, they are ravenous all the time and small enough to escape the view of water birds. I like the fancy tailed guppies but I've found that over time and generations they regress to mainly grey. The Mollies are the best at scavenging for anything that falls in the pond that might be food. They also eat some algae and they survive without me feeding them in my outside ponds. I do feed them occasionally but not regularly. As a side benefit, they will give you a pedicure if you stick your feet in the pond!

I've had two 4" goldfish in with the plant for the last week, and they looked all right today. I may put a few more in. Not sure if I would put larger koi in, which tend to be more aggressive about tasting the plants. Still thinking about this one.

I did have a bit of a surprise today, however.



Euryale has decided to bloom, without waiting for its larger home. The leaves are about 18" now, and I filled the tank to the brim so that they could easily spill out over the edge of the tank. The bud was partly open underwater today, which is typical for Euryale, so I boosted the pot 3" to get it above the surface. Here's a close up.

Gorgeous!! Good for you!

Beautiful Paul.

And here's the flower blooming this morning. I had to lift it out of the water some more, as it had sagged overnight.