Bring to Life Inactive, Dormant Water Plants After the Winter Months

Its spring and many of your plants have gone dormant for the winter. What do you do to get your beautiful water garden back in bloom? Lucky for most water gardeners the water plants will grow back as the weather and the water continues to warm up. You can give your plants a big boost with a little tender loving care.

When to Put the Plants Back?
If you removed your plants to store them over the winter you will need to start putting them back in the spring. Some of the hardier plants such as Lotus can be put back in the pond when the water temperature has reached about 50 degrees Fahrenheit. You should wait on placing cold-sensitive plants like the Tropical Water Lily back until the water temperature is around 70 degrees.

Checking Your Plants
Look over each plant's container. If the soil has dissipated into the water or just fallen out in storage fill it back in. It's a good idea to check and make sure your plants aren?t pot bound or too big for their container.

Signs will be lots of root tendrils on the surface of the soil and wrapped around the inside wall of the container. If they are pot bound remove them carefully and place in a larger container or you can try splitting the plant into two smaller ones and planting those in a method often called propagation. Splitting works well if you have a tuber plant that tends to create rhizomes or smaller tubers.

Replace the layer of rocks or pebbles that serve to protect the soil in the container from floating away in the pond water as well.

Fertilizing
Fertilizer is one easy way to boost your plant’s growth, especially after the dormant season. There are many types of fertilizers available to feed water plants. The important thing is to pick a fertilizer that will give your plants everything they need to grow healthy, such as nitrogen, iron, calcium and other minerals.

At the time of placement you can give the plants this extra boost by placing slow release fertilizer into the plant’s soil. Tablets are most convenient for this because they can be pushed into the soil and covered.

Before Winter
Take care of your plants before winter. Stop fertilizing the plants in fall and begin removing the top growth so your plants will develop more of a root system. Its important to have a strong root system for winter and to come back in the spring. You can remove top growth by cutting out yellowing, brown and broken foliage.

In the fall you’ll need to set the cold hardy plants in the bottom of the pond so they will be better protected from the cold weather. If however it looks like the pond will freeze solid you must remove all plants.

Its easy to store them in the basement wrapped in wet burlap and a plastic garbage bag. Remember to check the plants regularly and make sure the soil stays moist.

With careful planting, placement and fertilizing any water gardener can return the pond to its lush beauty of last summer. If the plants could talk they'd thank you for all the hard effort.