My experience with growing EE's in the Midwest is this.
Once they are a growing plant with lots of foliage they require lots of water and can take water ponds, bogs, wet areas of your yard. I plant some in the ground that remains soggy in spring from our spring rains but must be watered frequently if that dries up. The remainder I plant in containers. If it is a colocasia=bulb I dig it, clean it, let it dry then store in brown paper bags filled with saw dust of non treated wood and store in a cool dark location in the basement.
The Alocasia are simply too large for me to get inside so I plant them in a one gallon pot and plant that in a very large decorative container or sink it into the ground. In fall I cut back the foliage to 6", wrestle the one gallon container out of the ground or big pot (not always easy), hose off the one gallon containers and I have shelving in a sunny office. On the shelving I lay trays with no holes and put the pots of EE on the trays and water weekly. It is a mess and the EE sometimes grow, sometimes die back. Looks awful and is a big mess.
Once it is consistently 60 degrees at night they can all go outside. (I have started the bulbs in the house in February and the mess and disadvantages outway any advantage I get from this method unless you are using a greenhouse which I don't). You will still find most of the EE's are very slow and some look dead like they will not return. Probably your ground temperatures are still not warm enough. Once it gets hot, hot, hot (my first 3 days of 100 degrees) suddenly gorgeous EE's appear.
For me it various considerably but this year it was late June. My guess is gardeners are getting very anxious by the end of May and when they don't see a plant they think it's dead...really just needs more time. Your patience will reward you.
Here is a link to the research I have done on tropical gardening
http://gardenersdetective.web....
Sorry Taylor, guess this looks more like an article than a post.
