"CanadianCowboy©" wrote in message
...
I know it is too early to be thinking of this but this will help me on how
much to invest in tropical plants vs hardy lilies for this year.

Can these tropical plants such as water lettuce, hyacinth, etc be brought
inside
and put in large buckets with artificial
lighting and expect them to live until spring ?

I pretty much agree with what everyone else said. I kept some Water Hyacinth
and Water Lettuce inside this year and the WH grew very well. I'm not sure
if there is any WL left, as the WH has outgrown it by leaps and bounds. I've
had to throw out a bunch of the WH and there are still too many. It cost me
about $20 a month for the lighting and the Hydro is scheduled to go up big
time next year. At $5.00 a plant for new ones the cost is a toss up. I
probably have a 100 plants now, but many are plantlets and not the full
fledged ones with roots.

The bugs are also an issue as Jan mentioned. I've had several outbreaks of
those small flys and I even had a Damsel fly a few weeks ago.