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I lost a plant... under my lawn. How do I find it?

seedjar

Let's positive thinking!
There's a voodoo lily in my yard that I had wanted to divide this summer. Unfortunately, a well-meaning helper lopped the foliage off of it while giving me a hand with dandelions, and with a bunch of other stuff to do around the house I kind of forgot all about it for a while.
How can I find it? I know where it is within a meter radius or so. From what I've read, the tubers of voodoo lilies are usually only partly buried by the time they reach adulthood, but the grass is thick enough right now that I can't see it easily. My plan is to trim things back and look for anything that looks like old foliage. Could I maybe probe the soil with a bamboo skewer or something? I don't want to just dig random holes, but if it comes to that, how far down should I go before giving up? Six inches? A foot? I suspect that I would find some sort of hole where the new growth emerges from each year.
Any help would be great - thanks.
~Joe
 
Maybe you could try walking on the grass until ya feel a bump! :-O
 
When we were kids we would take a kitchen knife and cut out chunks of the yard and end up with sod like slabs of soil. You could do the same in the area you believe the tuber to be hiding, if there's nothing there just put the slab of grass back and the yard ought no know no different when spring comes. If it's not buried all that deep the tuber "may" come up in the slab of grass itself and that would be nice!

Good luck with it, I kill just about anything that needs a dormancy. Especially those damn tuberous Aroids that I like but can't have (for long)!
 
At first when I saw, "When we were kids we would take a kitchen knife and..." I was thinking, "Here's a last-resort idea." But that's actually the quickest, most sensible plan I've come across yet. Thanks! I've even got the perfect crappy kitchen knife that won't hold an edge!
~Joe
 
LOL! After we cut out chunks of grass what we did with them was NOT sensible so I won't elaborate! But for a sensible use you can easily find worms for fishing that way too.

Isn't your ground frozen yet?
 
It's in the process of un-freezing, actually, now that the rain has returned. But while the cold was here, I learned that you can separate the tannins from bogwater by freezing it.
~Joe
 
Lol we finally thawed out up here......how about you Joe? XD and i would just do what swords said...ive got a tuber of an Amorphophallus Konjac sitting next to me
 
My house is too shady for things to have fully thawed yet. My deep trays are still ice about halfway down, and my water tanks are still mostly frozen. That's how I noticed the bogwater thing - a bottle of peat/coffee/black tea water that I left outside froze about three or four inches thick on the outer edge, but the stuff that's still liquid in the center was almost black (before it was just kind of murky orange-brown.) The water from the ice thawing on top is totally clear like rainwater. It looked really strange before I put two and two together.
~Joe
 
did you find that lily what a pickle . id probably wait till spring cant they be moved even after they start new growth?
 
  • #10
Haven't had a chance to go digging yet; my water trays have only recently thawed, so I'm not sure that the ground is not still frozen. I'll probably try it this weekend.
~Joe
 
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