I went to the link and read as well as I cd. I am a bit puzzled. Every pot I have with veggies or houseplants have pebbles and pot shards at the bottom. The articles says that it doesn't help. But all my pots drain well and everytime I water, as I stand and watch as all the water flows out all over my patio with all the precious ferts that I add, I am further puzzled. I use MG pottg mix, or Scotts or the organic MG. What is the explanation?

I have had success planting elephant ears for the last few years. I've left them in the ground, except for the couple times I took some in containers into the garage and left them there for winter. I heavily mulched the ones in the ground over winter (about 8 inches of cedar mulch), with no watering in winter. They usually come back bigger the next year, although some have rotted. I'll be uncovering them in the next few days, and I'll "help" slough off some of the decayed tops, if there are some that have decayed. When I do this, they usually sprout new growth shortly thereafter. Some have grown to amazing size: as high as about 8 feet, with a base over 2 feet. Don't give up on the ones you planted, but remember that frost knocks them back, and they have to be mulched in winter. Let's hope you weren't too early. When they get going, I sprinkle bone meal around the area above the bulb a few times during summer, and it seems to keep them going strong. Good luck!

How could I have forgotten! A more suitable choice for that climate may well be some of the new hybrids released by briansbotanicals! Noble gigante Dragon heart And... Future releases! I don't know how these handle the lower humidity, I do know these 2 can handle much more sun than the Thai giant, and can still achieve massive size! As one parent is Thai giant, under differnt light the leaves may be green purple black in varies shades and hues, some bright, others dusty, usually combinations of all those, and the future releases he's got under trial look great! There's also jacks giant, it's a super sized regular colocasia esculenta, it still wants some shade but may do very well for you I'd order directly from his site. I'm sure he can help answer how to best grow them there too Best of luck, whatever you chose u can't go wrong, amazing plants!

June, please don't forget to tell us who you think Marlena was calling when she asked Jacob to wish her luck. I finally located the passage, but I had lost the context so I had to back up and reread that chapter. It didn't help me, thus I'm thinking it must allude to something even further back that didn't register with me -- unless it was, as Lydia says, someone she could contact about getting a job with Ringling Bros. Vee, re redlighting, that act of throwing nonproductive or unwanted people off the train: The word itself definitely came from circus jargon. I had to look it up to make sure. (Does anyone else think Gruen could/should have provided a glossary?) I don't know if it was done in quite so dramatic a way as Gruen describes; the sites I went to said it was done mainly when the train was going slowly, before it got up to full speed -- the people hit the ground, perhaps with a hard landing, but most were able to get up unhurt (or with minor injuries), yet there was no way they could catch up with the train and get aboard again. If bodies of maimed or dead people were littering either sides of the tracks or under the trestles, surely there would have been some questions asked by the folk who found the bodies and authorities would have been alerted. I know it was the Depression and there were things that often went unreported, but if it happened with great enough frequency, there would have been some sort of outcry -- people were people during the Depression, too, and they all weren't cowed by circumstance. My father, as a teenager in the early 1930s, did some railriding. He and his buddies would hitchhike to Chicago, then hop a train to New Orleans and then hop another for the return to Chicago. (From New Orleans, he made it to Los Angeles and on to Seattle before retracing.) They could do it legally in an empty freight car for a penny a mile, but of course many didn't have the funds. The legals would hide the illegals under clothes and blankets, but the "tosser" often managed to find them and, true to his job title, he tossed them off the train, physically. According to daddy, he was tossed off a few times himself. Daddy referred to it as redlighting, so the circus phrase was in the vernacular at the time. I didn't get sappy about the animals in Gruen's story as much as I did about Camel and Walter being thrown off the train while it was on the trestle. Maybe such things happened, maybe they didn't -- I'll allow Gruen license, anyway, although I wonder why she thought it was necessary to kill them off. But that poor little dog, Queenie, without Walter... And what makes it particularly affecting to me was the earlier scene when Queenie was lost and Walter would have missed the train to look for her, if Jacob hadn't physically thrown Walter onto the moving train. I hate being manipulated by a writer with poignant animal scenes, but I have to admit Gruen pulled a good 'un on me.