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Growing Hydroponic Lily Flowers – A Full Guide

Do you want to grow Lillies in hydroponics? don’t worry we help you to achieve your goal in growing hydroponic lily. Everyone loves beautiful lilies and luckily they are members of the list of hydroponic flowers. With large, beautiful blooms, lilies add striking elegance to the yard, garden, or any place where it is grown from early to midsummer. Usually grown from bulbs, lilies are perennial flowers that grow year after year and have the need for minimal care, provided that you are planting them in the right place.

A step by step guide to growing hydroponic Lily 

Growing Hydroponic Lilly
Growing Hydroponic Lilly source: pixabay


Lilies have six plain or strikingly marked showy petals and which are often trumpet-shaped, sitting atop a tall, erect stem having narrow, long, lance-shaped leaves. They come in many beautiful colours, including shades of pink, gold, red, orange, and white.

Asiatic lilies – The Asiatic lily is the earliest to flower. They are also the easiest ones to grow. This lily can grow almost anywhere. Most of them are unscented, but they have the widest range of colours.

Martagon lilies – Martagon lilies have whorled leaves and Turk’s cap-like flowers. It is also known as Turk’s cap lily, with as many as 20 blooms growing on one stem. It comes in a variety of colours and is often spotted with flecks of colour. Martagons do not grow very well in hot climates. Trumpet lilies – Trumpet lilies are famed for their trumpet-like flowers and are extremely fragrant.

Tiger lilies – Tiger lilies are very hardy. The blooms are recurved and freckled. They propagate in clumps and produce more than a dozen flowers on each stem. Its colours range from a golden yellow to a deep red.

Rubrum lilies – The rubrum lily resembles the tiger lily, although the colours range from white to shades of deep pink and have a lingering sweet scent.

Oriental lilies – Oriental lilies flowers in mid-to-late summer, are the last lilies to bloom. The lilies can grow up to 8 feet tall. They have a characteristic spicy fragrance and come in different colours of pink, white red, and often bi-color.

Commercially, hydroponic lilies are cultivated for hydroponic cut flower production; it is common practice amongst experienced greenhouse growers. The same principles can also be applied on a smaller scale for an indoor garden like flowers that do well in hydroponics like hydroponic spider plants and hydroponic marigolds.

Hydroponics simply refers to the use of environmental control or other techniques to induce plants to flower on schedule, often to target specific markets like Christmas or Easter by force flowering, especially for commercial gains. But lily can also be grown indoors as the best flowers for indoor hydroponics by newbie growers for satisfying their hobby with these beautiful flowers.

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Propagating Lily in hydroponics

While lilies can be propagated using seeds which is not a very common method, the seed-raised plants won’t have the same true characteristics as their parents since many of the cultivars grown hydroponically are hybrids.

Plants raised from seed may also take many years to mature and flower. Lilies are best propagated vegetatively, which is relatively easy to carry out for home growers also. You can plant lily bulbs in the fall, a few weeks before the winter brings freezing low temperatures. Bulbs that are planted in the autumn will have well-established roots in the spring. The bulbs get benefit from a winter chill to produce big flowers.

As the plant matures, the lily bulb starts producing “offsets,” or small bulbs that can be divided away from the main bulb and utilized as the future planting material. Another method is to propagate from bulb “scales,” that is fleshy sections of the main bulb. The bulbs need to be “vernalized,” or cold pre-treated, in cool, moist conditions (with temperature in the range of 35-50˚F, depending on the cultivar) for about six- to eight-week period. The vernalization treatment can be done artificially using refrigeration or if season and temperatures permit, it can also be done naturally by placing potted plants outdoors during winter. (Good news is, bulbs can also be bought pre-chilled.)The cold treatment provided during the process of vernalization permits the bulbs to rapidly produce a high-quality flowering shoot. Lilies commence shooting in about one to three weeks after its planting, depending on the variety and growing conditions provided. Meanwhile, one of the buds at the base will also develop into daughter bulbs, which can later be utilized to propagate more plants. If provided with sufficient warmth and light, conditions most of the lilies will rapidly produce flower buds; the time to flowering in many varieties is just 95-120 days.

The scales are break off as close to the base of the main bulb as possible, then the lower half is placed into a free-draining substrate. After a few weeks under warmer conditions, the small bulblets will begin to produce on the scales. When these have developed roots, they can be gently removed and potted up for growing in the hydroponic system. Lilies require lots of sunlight. For ideal blooms, lilies need 6 to 8 hours of direct sunlight every day. If it’s too shady, you can notice that the stems will try to lean towards the sun or get spindly and fall over. Hence when growing Lily makes sure your hydroponic system is getting adequate sunlight or install grow lights. It is often suggested to plant the bulbs three times as deep as the height of the bulb in moistened grow media and set the bulb in the hole keeping its pointy side up. Space bulbs at a distance if using a common grow tray equal to three times the bulb’s diameter (usually about 8 to 18 inches apart, this also depends on the variety).

Lilies are a famed cut flower or potted plant having a successful long history of cultivation and appreciation all over the globe. No matter if they are being grown as a crop for cut blooms for a special occasion or just an attractive dwarf potted plant in your hydroponic garden, they are versatile, colorful, and often highly perfumed additions to an indoor garden filling your space with a lingering fragrance.

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Hydroponic Systems for Lily

Lilies grow well using numerous different hydroponic techniques. Experienced growers have suggested that lily bulbs can be supported in large stone wool cubes by using NFT or ebb and flow methods to deliver the nutrient solution constantly.NFT is the most desirable technique of hydroponics for Lily commercially as well as for home growers it is effective for bulblets and daughter production too.NFT is an efficient and precise system to feed roots with nutrient solution, oxygen, and water crucial for flower production.

For bulbs grown in grow pots using techniques like Dutch bucket, DWC, selection of the appropriate type of hydroponic medium is essential for hydroponic lilies. Coarser grades of composted bark, coconut fiber, sawdust, perlite, and various combinations of these usually yield good results.

The nutrient solution for growing hydroponic Lily

On a small scale or indoor hydroponic system, standard grows and bloom nutrient formulations can be applied during the growth phase. Lilies are not initially a high nutrient demanding crop as the bulb remains itself a reservoir of nutrients during the early growth phase; however, once stem growth initiates and bud development has occurred, calcium and potassium supply need to be boosted to ensure strong flower formation.

During the bud development stage, a suitable lily hydroponic nutrient formation contains the following levels of elements these ranges can be met by nutrient solutions available in the market which are specially formulated for hydroponic production:

Nitrogen 227 ppm, Phosphorus 100 ppm, Potassium 340 ppm

Magnesium in a range of 80 ppm, Calcium 197 ppm, Sulphur 108 ppm

Iron 5 ppm, Manganese 2 ppm, Zinc 0.25 ppm

Boron 0.70 ppm Copper 0.07 ppm Molybdenum 0.05ppm

Ideal pH range:  5.8-6.2

Harvesting and Storage of Lillies

Lilies make wonderful cut flowers. However, one must avoid cutting off more than one-third of the stem, which can reduce the plant’s vigor and longevity.

If you are growing lilies strictly for cut flower production, consider planting them in a designated cutting garden system, where you can plant fresh bulbs every year.

When cutting lilies, choose those buds that are just about to open, with a little bit of the flower color showing. The higher-up buds will open as the bottom ones will fade away. That’s all folks about hydroponic Lily growing methods. Keep growing flowers in hydroponics!.

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1 COMMENT

  1. Hello,

    The information is very crucial for growing lilies. But I would like to know the formula for growing lilies in cocopeat pot using fertilizer formula container A and container B and how many litre of water per day

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