I just recently got back into ponding after about 10 years out of it and last week I bit the bullet and bought several varieties of tropical water lilies. They showed up on my porch in the middle of a bad rain storm and by the time it stopped it was dark. I had to work the next day so I opened them up and floated them in the pond.

I finally got them potted yesterday morning and of course as my luck would have it, we get a nice cold spell. Lower 60s during the day and upper 40s at night. I read that tropicals can go dormant if the temperature goes below 65 degrees.

Cue me panicking... I didn't have a water thermometer so I grabbed the meat thermometer and stuck it in the pond yesterday. The water temperature was 69 degrees. I was a little more relieved but not enough to keep me from having a nightmare last night about it snowing on them. So again this morning (since it was even colder last night), I check the temperature and it is 68 degrees. So far so good.

Temps are supposed to be back up to a more seasonal 78/80 Wednesday so if they can make it one more day then I think I'm in the clear. Has anybody here had any experience with tropicals going into dormancy due to putting them out too early? Did they come out of it okay? Was their growth/blooming stunted for that year?

I ALMOST brought them inside last night and put them in the extra bath tub, but that would have required me pulling them out of the pots and I didn't want to have to repot them all again. I hope they're going to be okay...

This winter I'm either going to try to overwinter the tubers like I've read of some people doing or cut the larger pads back and bring the pots inside in a small plastic kiddy-pool and put it in front of the window in an extra room.

Years back when I tried this the first time, I tried overwintering tropical tubers wrapped up in lightly moist paper towels in baggies in the crisper drawer of the fridge (had read that online). It didn't work and I lost them all. I've since read some other methods that might work better.

Thanks again for the encouragement Gary.

But, I noticed more pads on the surface today and last night was the last cold night. I think the crisis has been averted.

I'm not sure about them overwintering in the pond, but I'm going to try several different overwintering experiments with them to give me a better chance of them coming back next year.

I did think about getting a stock tank heater and putting it in the lower pond to see if I could overwinter that way. I'm also going to collect the corms and try overwintering that way. Hopefully I'll come across a method that works that I can use year after year.