Bill D. ,
When I started my lilies 3 years ago I needed a lot of containers, like 35 or of them. So I went to the Dollar Store and bought a bunch of clear plastic shoe boxes. I planted the bare roots in the boxes using dirt from the bottom of my pond. I placed the boxes in the shallow part of my pond as Bill Cody instructed me to do and moved them deeper as they grew. During June of that year, I had to move all of them into a mesh pen I made to protect the young lilies from a slime algae problem I was having. The only problem with the shoe boxes is that they are not very big and I had to transplant the lilies to the pond bottom at the end of the summer. Once the lilies start to grow in your containers you can fertilize them with tomato fertilizer spikes.
Good luck!
sean
