Thanks so much Debbie for replying to my post. I think I see what I did wrong last year---I continued to water as usual because I knew that the elephant ears liked moisture. I did not reduce the water to trigger dormancy as you suggested. Our average frost date is mid October. I have noticed that the nights are cooler than before and the day temperatures are lower too. I think it will be time soon to stop watering. I will cut the top off and check on the bulb. I wouldn't want to bring it in with its pot (too big) and then find out it had rotted! My other elephant ears are smaller. I think I will pick one of them to keep as a houseplant. The only worry I have (besides bulb rot) is fungus gnats since the soil likes to be kept moist. The other three elephant ears I'll keep in their pots, but stop watering until spring. I sure hope this all works out! Thanks so much! By the way, Illustris is a lovely elephant ear. . . don't you think?

Ditto re: warmth. I planted one last year. I started it indoors in the beginning of May. It was moved outside at the end of the month. 2 days later, we had a hailstorm that ripped many of the leaves. I was horrified! However, Mom Nature takes care of her own. About a week after the storm I had this: That big leaf measured 20" x 13"! It was bigger than my head! LOL! Here it is a week later. You can see one of the damaged leaves here. This one was taken 7/10/04- A couple of weeks later... I had it in a 16" pot. When I removed it from the pot at the end of the season, there was a SOLID mass of roots. Also... as you can see by the pics, they grow BIG! By the end of September, it took up about a 4ft area in the corner of my yard. OH.... It's a VERY thirsty plant!

These are my notes on my first full year of dealing with my EE's, including last year's overwintering. Still I'm looking for additional overwintering tips, especially for the black EE's, of which I have quite a few. As you can see from the 'time lapse' picture series below, our Elephant Ears did pretty well this year. Once the weather here in Ohio heated up (mid 80's), the EE's added approximately 4 feet of growth during the month of August. After a frost last night (October 28), they now look awful and I'm digging them up and heading them to the basement. This will be the 2nd winter I'll be attempting to overwinter them. While I was successful with overwintering last year, I'm still hesitant that I will do something wrong. I'll describe what I did last year and any additional hints and tips would be much appreciated. The large plant pictured below was very simply, dug up and the clump put into a pot and placed in our basement which gets very little light. I watered them pretty regularly for a while but they declined until I got lazy (plus the mites set in) and quit watering and they completely dried out. Come spring they started putting up some shoots even though they were bone dry, presumably from all the energy stored in the corms. When it warmed further, the clump (and two others) was moved outside where it grew into the monster pictured. (it, and the other two, ended up about 7 feet tall with a 3 foot base and maintained about 60-70 leaves all year, with the largest leaves reaching about 5 feet long) I feel that just letting it dry out will be the way to go this year. However, I have concerns about the approximately 70 other smaller EE plants (especially the approx. 40 black plants) I have. They have been growing in pots in standing water rather than in the ground like my regular EE's. From the other posts, I'm afraid that my black EE's will suffer or die if they dry out. I do have to add that last year I had about 20 small black EE's (a couple varieties) that I carried into the basement which got the same treatment as the large green Colocasia's (watered for a while then let dry out). I did get a pretty decent number that died but still quite a few that sprung back up once they were taken outside once the weather warmed. I don't want to lose half because I have a larger number this year. Quite simply, should they be kept moist all winter even in the low-light conditions? I'll probably have more to add but this is already long so I leave it here for now. Thanks everyone.

They need consistent warmth (60-70F soil temp) for about 4-5 weeks to sprout, so either it isn't warm enough, or you overwatered since they do not need water to sprout; wet soil can easily lead to rot in Colocasia tubers. Carefully dig around and take a peek.