I will forever be grossed out by the horsehair worm but it shocks me to see an expanded discussion of roundworms as nematodes.I knew there were beneficial and not so beneficial nematodes in the soil and I knew there were roundworm eggs in the soil from feces of infected animals and I have seen roundworms being expelled from an infected puppy back when it was not common to treat pets automatically for the parasite. Somehow I never thought of them as related. Cathy, don't even joke about having the parasite yourself. While it mostly lives in the gut of animals it can migrate through the bloodstream into the lungs, liver, heart and brain where it can kill you if it doesn't make you blind or crazy first. The Feds say that trichinosis is gone so we can eat our pork pink now but I remember the horror stories too well to ever eat it any way but well done. I was taught that it was the basis for the prohibition from eating pork for Jews and Muslims. Most of those dietary laws were there for good reason. I also remember my parents being very reluctant to allow me to swim in a public pool when they were first becoming popular. They knew parasites could enter through any mucous membrane and the combination of intestinal worms and Polio made the super saturation with chlorine quite popular for hot, sweaty kids. If my swim suit didn't fade drastically and start coming apart then there must not have been enough chlorine to their thinking. Would you believe that it was once common for women who wanted to be fashionably thin to deliberately infect themselves with roundworms?!? That goes along with the arsenic in the face powder to make them fashionably pale and other horrors of the history of womanly beauty. Now I have made myself paranoid and I will be wearing latex gloves 24/7. Sandy

Hi Marcia, I live in zone 5 too. Up until recently, I have been just burying my lotus containers in the ground over the winter....not very deep......just below the soil surface, and then covering them with leaves. You have to water them several times during the winter, if they are in a protected area that doesn't get rain. Last April, we made a lotus bog. It is a 300 gallon Rubbermaid stocktank that was sunk into the ground, and then dirt put back in to about 10" from the top, then filled with water. We just started it last April, so this is the first winter its gone through. It hasn't sprouted yet, but I'm sure it will. And it was ALOT of work to dig that big hole. Some people here have just dug a hole near their pond and keep the lotus in that (protecting it with mulch over the winter). I'm going to try that next year, but instead of just putting the container down in the hole, I bought a 40 gallon Tuff Stuff tank and will sink it into the ground, and then put a 25 gallon container of lotus into that one, making it easy to take it out to thin it, and then put it back in. Hopefully it will be okay over winters, with a layer of mulch/leaves over it. I was going to do it this year, but wasn't sure where I wanted the lotus, so I'm just keeping it on the ground this year, until I decide. I hope I haven't confused you.

I use fertilizer tablets, lots bigger than stakes. I get them with no packaging from my pond club; they get them in bulk at the farm supply. They're slow release, so great for ponds, but all kinds of other plants like them, too.

I have a lotus pond that I first planted middle of last year. The lotus multiplied quickly spreading throughout the pond and then put out a lot of flowers. Recently they stopped flowering so I gave them 6 monsoon tablets (probably similar to your fruit tree fertiliser spikes). That was a week ago. They've put out another flower now, but that would have been on it's way before I gave the fertiliser. I understand that they do like a lot of fertiliser and probably yours will come good since you gave them that boost. Most likely because they had been so 'starved' they've just needed time to take it up. What you give them now would probably deliver results in the following season. That's often the case with plants that have storage organs.