What is the best time to divide and transplant water lilies
Water lilies not only bloom beautifully, but if grown in a pot they can also bring a touch of nature into the environment, and if you keep some small fish in there and add a few small ornaments, it can add even more wild charm. To save trouble, many gardening friends often just buy ready-made seedlings to pot up. For home pot growers, seedlings can generally be raised by sowing seeds and by division.
However, if dividing, you need to get the timing right, because dividing at the proper time makes it easier for the plant to resume normal growth after being potted and established. That said, dividing and transplanting water lilies generally needs to be done together with repotting, because water lilies generally need regular repotting every 1-2 years. So when do you divide and transplant water lilies?
As for the time for dividing and transplanting, spring is usually chosen, and late March in spring is the most suitable time to take the plant out of its pot for division and transplanting. Because this is also exactly the best time to repot water lilies, and taking the opportunity to divide and transplant then is ideal. At this time, we dig out the water lily's rhizomes, then cut them into root sections about 10-15 cm long, and plant them separately in pots.
In fact, water lilies are suited to being repotted once a year, and this should be done in spring, when both repotting and dividing are at their best. Because water lilies have relatively poor cold tolerance, in late March of spring the temperature has basically started to rise again, and the water lily will also gradually resume growth after lying dormant through the winter. Dividing at this time not only makes it easier for the water lily to quickly resume growth afterward, but also makes it less susceptible to cold damage.
It is worth noting that when dividing, we may see that some water lily seedlings have a small bulb-like thing growing beneath them, so can we simply snap off the seedling together with the small bulb and plant them separately in pots? Experienced gardening friends naturally would not do this, because a snapped-off seedling with a bulb is very hard to keep alive. Some seedlings may even have only fibrous roots below and not even a small bulb, so if you want to divide them, keeping them alive is often even more difficult.
To help divided water lily seedlings survive smoothly after potting, it is recommended to cut off the tender shoot together with the root tuber below it, and then plant the divided seedlings separately; this usually makes it easier for them to survive. If you are not confident, do not just pull off the tender shoot and pot it directly, otherwise it is generally hard to get it to survive quickly, and it may even die soon; even if the tender shoot has a small bulb, this is not recommended.