Colocasia Care Tips || How to Grow Elephant Ears

Hey, what's up garden friends? Jeff here, how's everybody doing? Hope you're doing well. I'm great that just getting some late season filming done out here. We're gonna be moving through this one fairly quickly. This is just a quick video by request over like a few years. Sorry it took me so long to actually get around to doing it. Just talking about care tips for elephant ears, for Colocasias to be specific. Talk about how I grow them with just some Colocasia information and troubleshooting. I like to mix those all together. Usually comes out for more well-rounded information. So here in front of me I have my Colocasia maui golds, which are looking rather sad right now, but that's normal. It's the time of year they're dying back and getting ready to go into a dormant period. This is what they should look like right now, so don't be concerned. They're fine. They had a wonderful growing season. Did very well. Then down here I have my Colocasia bikini teenies, which are a perennial here in zone 6a, 6b. They do a lot of growing. Really sturdy plants that are lit horribly. So maybe we'll go back to the other ones. Colocasia's elephant ears. Really common garden plants. Lots of us grow them whether you live in a zone where they can go all year or you have to dig them up and store them. They're popular. That's for good reason. They have big beautiful foliage, have a great impact wherever you put them in the garden. Some types will fill in a space very quickly. Others will form more of a tight clump, and they're just pretty. These bikini teenies are fun because when the water collects inside those cups they spill forward like a little fountain during the rain. Generally low maintenance, easy plants to have in the garden, but that of course can vary depending on where you live and the quality of your soil and water. All of those things. Just going into general care for Colocasia, they typically like part shade to full sun. The amount of light you give them is really going to depend on, well one, what type you're growing. Most can take a good amount of sun, and where you live. So in a more dry climate, if you live in a place with really really bone dry air and soil, I would give this plant more shade than sun because they'll probably crisp up. Colocasia's absolutely love water and they love nutrients. That's the biggest thing with them is to keep them moist. Don't let them dry out for too terribly long in a well-drained organically rich soil, whether they're in a pot or in the ground. They can be grown as bog plants. You can put them in a pond. You can set the container where it's just a little bit into the water. They do great on drip irrigation. That can make a big difference with their growth. Something to look out for with these, if you're noticing that the foliage is really small, that can be for a couple of reasons. It can be that, well it's the time of year, it's normal for those leaves to come out smaller as there's less light during the day and as the nighttime temperatures start to cool. Another really big factor though that can go into the size of the foliage is the amount of organic matter available to the plant, or just the nutrient level in general. Plants that are really really hungry for some fertilizer or some compost, something blended down there below the soil, those will typically have smaller leaves on them. Good to go ahead and make sure to blend in some sort of compost. Maybe sea kelp, some alfalfa meal, that's great. It helps retain some moisture as well. Keep in mind the pH of the soil as well. If the pH is too high, that can bind up certain nutrients to the plant. They do prefer things acidic to neutral, so like five and a half to seven somewhere in there. A little bit over seven is probably fine too. Pretty forgiving plants. You have some leeway with a lot of the typical things that we say they have to have. Some of them do need better drainage than others. The leucocagia, which is the Thai giant, those, they are more prone to rotting. I think that that's maybe because it takes them so long to develop a tuber. I'm not really sure, but with those, I probably wouldn't put that in a pond unless you live someplace that's truly tropical, and you're not going to have to worry about anaerobic buildup around those roots. So just watch out for rot. Make sure that your soil is draining well. Speaking of drainage, places with really sandy soils, those tend to be more nutrient deficient. So that's when it would be a really good idea to make sure to blend in something else around that plant, maybe even monthly during the growing season, whatever it takes, because when it rains in a sandy soil, that just flushes everything out, and there's not a ton of nutrient with sand, right? It's not, that's not soil. Soil has organic matter in it. There's bacterial properties with sand. That's a whole different thing. We don't need to talk about all that. That goes into talking about like root hormones and nitrogen cycle. That's a different video. Over time, their tubers do tend to migrate up like every, I don't know, maybe three or four years, something like that. It's probably a good idea to go ahead and see if that tuber has worked its way up and out of the soil, and if it has, you need to dig that up and push it back down. For those of us who have to move the plants in and out during the wintertime, we don't really have to worry about that because you just replant it in the spring. Make sure that it's at least two inches below the soil, preferably about four inches below is generally a good spot for them. Can be propagated by seed or from divisions taken around the clump. If you were going to divide them from the little offshoots that they put up, it's a good idea to make sure that you're doing that when they still have an ample amount of growing time left in the season to re-establish themselves. So I don't tend to take any offshoots from mine, like right now. It's late October. It'll be November by the time this video comes out. Those offshoots aren't going to have time to re-establish themselves. It's not warm, so just dividing them up and re-potting those divisions, I don't know, there's more of a risk for rot. They'll just be sitting in moist soil and not an active growth. And then I cut back on fertilizing about four to six weeks before there's usually a first frost, just to allow the plant to go ahead and start taking nutrients back down into those tubers, help get them prepared to store. Again, that's those shorter day lengths, sometimes the cooler nights, that's going to trigger the nutrient backflow down into that tuber. So I just don't want to interrupt that, right? I want to go ahead and let that process happen. I don't do any pruning unless the leaves are fully crisped up and dried off. I just leave it alone. Then the fall, if you have them in the ground, you can let them take a frost and then cut them back and mulch them over. Indoor storage, that's a whole, really storage is a whole different thing. I have another video that, that should already be out by now, so you can check that if you want to know about overwintering them, what to do with the tubers during the winter time. It can get complicated because there are different types of Colocasias, different root structures that they'll have, and how you overwinter them really is going to depend on which ones you have. Yep, that's going to do it, though. Not a lot to it. They like water, they like nutrients, that's why it's going to depend on where you live, and there are things that go into the size of their leaves. That's it, pretty easy plants, really fun plants. Comment down below, say hi, I love talking to everybody, and tips, tricks, suggestions, always appreciated. What have been your experiences with Colocasias? Do you have any magic elixirs you use around the soil to help keep them growing and thriving? You keep them in your ponds, what are you doing with them? I hope everybody's doing well, having a great day, and a great life, and everything's just going beautifully for you. And of course, as always, and most importantly everybody, keep on growing! Bye bye!