Quote:
Originally Posted by Raymond
A quick question about wintering elephant ears over the winter.
I live in Missouri and am really getting into the tropical look in my yard,so far i have 6 different types of banana's, 3 different elephant ears and two typs of hardy palms and am always looking for new hardy varieties of all......sorry now for the question of over wintering the elephant ears. In the past I was only working with what I call the "common" elephant ear that you can get at walmart in the spring and in the fall i dig them up remove all soil,roots, leaves let them dry then put in a containner......will this method work ok for all varieties? or should i do swomething different because I tried this with the black variety twice with no luck.
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'Elephant Ears' is a common applied to many species of Xanthosoma, Colocasia and Alocasia, among a few others. It is difficult to help unless you are more specific.
All of these plants die when frozen. If your ground freezes they will not respout in the spring. You will need to dig them up (the corms, that is), wrap them in newspaper or burythem in a pot full of some type of insulating material and keep them somewhere where they will not freeze, perhaps a garage or a cool place in the house.
Once spring arrives they can be replanted. These plants have varied cold limits and it this advice comes after growing all of them. I have found that the Xanthosomas, in general, take the least cold, followed by the Colocasias and then the Alocasias. There are overlaps in each of these genera of course but this is a good guideline.
Good luck.