Planting lotus is tough work and here is the reason.

Many years ago, i bought some lotus seeds from a thailand florist. It was only recently my mum talked about planting lotus, then i brought out the seeds to show her. She dropped around 4-5 seeds into a small tank and changed water regularly. However, after more than a month, there was no visible change to the seeds. Then i remember i read something about hacking the seed’s shell from the shipped instructions (2 A4 pages of instructions). However, i have lost it after such a long time. The last time i remember was showing it to my good friend many years back. Finally after much tracing, i managed to find the original website i ordered the seeds from and found the required instructions. It said

“These seed must be nicked with a sharp knife ( careful here ) or rubbed with a file or scraped across concrete to break the hard seed coating. You can file top or bottom, just stop when you see the creme colored inner core.”

As i could not find my file (yes, i remember i have a file at home somewhere), i used a pen knife to cut and scrap the shell. It was a lot of hard work and i could not penetrate the hard shell at all. I also tried with the nail’s file. No luck at all. Then i decided to forget about the whole thing and continue my life as usual until one day i discovered that the tank with the seeds was empty! My mum has given up and threw away the seeds! Oh dear!

Today could be a lucky day. I took back the seeds from my mum and i found the “lost” file. So i decided to put in some effort to file 3 seeds (the number 3 should be an auspicious number???) and continue the lotus project.

Planting my lotus seeds

Hopefully in the next few days or so, the seeds will germinate and grow into flowers like below.

Lotus flower

Related posts:

1. Planting lotus is tough work – part 4 – The End
2. Planting lotus is tough work – part 3
3. Planting lotus is tough work – part 2
4. 大人の科学 – otonanokagaku – Part 2