Originally Posted by john_ny

John,

Thanks for the info. I don't know whether I have a dwarf or standard. I bought it at the end of the Tropical Plant Industry Exposition trade show, when a lot of the exhibitors sell stuff off cheap.
There is a tag on it that says, "Mrs. Perry D. Slocum". I Googled that, and got some pictures. It seems to be a pretty enough flower, but I didn't notice any information, as to size.
I was mainly concerned that the water would get stagnant, and smell. I do remember, however, something from years ago, when I had a tropical fish import business. I had a greenhouse, with concrete benches, that I had converted to fish pools. We also sold aquarium plants, many of which we got, weekly, from a grower in Florida. Some weeks, we would have a few left over, that we just threw out.
One time, I had about 300 Corkscrew Valisneria left, that I decided I'd try to keep. In a 5 X10 foot pool, I placed a 6 cu. foot bale of peat moss, a 40 lb. bag of dehydrated cow manure, and covered that with 300 lbs. of aquarium gravel. We had a little algae bloom at first but, once the plants got growing and depriving the algae of the nutrients, things cleared up pretty well. I threw in 3 pairs of Blue Gouramis to help keep things clean and, within months, I didn't have to buy any more Corkscrew plants and, after a few more months, I was able to pull out a couple of thousand 1 inch Blue Gouramis. Now that pool never got stinky. We had aeration on it. I don't remember if we had a filter or not.
I was thinking that maybe I could drop an air stone in the tub with the lotus, to help keep the water sweet. Of course, in about a month and a half, I could move it outside. (And if things got too bad, before then, I'd just dump the whole thing in the woods, and sacrifice the tuber.)