Elephant Ear

Six to eight weeks before your last frost, pot each corm in a large container of rich, moist media with the top of the corm just under the soil surface, and hold it somewhere warm and bright until the weather settles. Do not set corms straight into cold spring ground. Corms need eight to ten months of warm growing to size up, and the plant sulks and stalls when temperatures sit below 50F for long stretches, so a head start indoors buys the season length a corm crop needs.

Set corms, cormels, or huli sets at least 6 inches deep, spaced 18 to 24 inches apart in rows 18 to 24 inches apart, in deep friable loam at pH 5.5 to 6.5 with compost worked in. Avoid rocky or stony ground, which deforms the corms and makes digging them a fight. The harvested corm is the plant's own swelling stem, so it takes the shape of whatever the soil lets it take, and crowded or shallow plantings give you many small corms instead of a few good ones.

Keep the soil moist but drained, at or near field capacity, for the whole growing period, by furrow, sprinkler, or drip. Taro tolerates prolonged waterlogging and can be grown standing in shallow water, but dasheen types should not sit waterlogged for any extended length of time. Water availability drastically affects corm yield, and this is a plant built for warm, moist ground rather than a crop that shrugs off drought.

Work 2.75 to 3 lb of 7-30-20 or 10-20-20 per 100 square feet into the bed before planting, then side-dress 1 lb of 16-16-16 per 100 square feet at two, four, and six months after planting. Have your soil tested if you want rates matched to your own ground rather than these poor-soil figures. This is a hungry crop on a very long clock, and the corm is bulking right through the back half of the season, so a single spring feeding runs out long before harvest.

Check the petioles for scattered brown to black spots, which are stains from sap oozing out of leafhopper puncture holes, and look over the young leaves for aphid colonies. Treat only if the numbers are genuinely large, not on sight of a few insects. Taro leafhopper and aphids feed by sucking sap from petioles and leaf blades, but they rarely do real damage unless they build to high numbers, so most sightings need watching rather than spraying.

After wet spells, look for purplish to brownish circular water-soaked spots on the leaves that exude a clear yellow liquid, and pull off and remove badly blighted leaves. Also watch the crown for dry rot from Sclerotium rolfsii and for phyllosticta leaf spot, which mostly show up in poorly managed plantings. Leaf blight is driven almost entirely by climate rather than the calendar, flaring in wet seasons and fading through dry months, so rain is the trigger to inspect, not a date.

Expect harvest 8 to 10 months after planting. The plant tells you: leaves turn yellowish, petioles shorten to under 2 feet, and the corms start to protrude from the ground. Dasheen is ready once most cormels have gone dormant and the leaves have dried. Young leaves can be picked at any point during growth without lifting the plant. Maturity shifts with your location, variety, soil fertility, and water, so the plant's own decline is a far better signal than any month on a calendar.

Outside its hardy range, dig the corms once frost has knocked the foliage back, lift them gently with a fork so the skin is not pierced, dry them a few days out of the sun, and bury them in peat, sand, or vermiculite somewhere above 45F. Check them monthly, cut away any soft spots, and let the cut dry before re-storing. This is a tender tropical perennial hardy only to about zone 8a, and a corm that freezes or that rots around an unnoticed wound is simply gone by spring.