Know someone who grows bananas? Talk to them. Every banana plant produces a lot more suckers than you need, so people usually have plenty to give away. Only take suckers from vigorous banana plants. The suckers should have small, spear shaped leaves and ideally be about four feet high. Smaller suckers will take longer to fruit and the first banana bunch will be smaller.
Cut the sucker from the main banana plant with a sharp shovel. Cut downwards between the mature plant and the sucker. You have to cut through the corm. It's not easy. Make sure you get a good chunk of corm and many roots with it. Chop the top off the sucker to reduce evaporation while you move it and while it settles into its new home. Remember, the growing point is at the bottom of a banana plant. You can decapitate the sucker.
It will grow back. Another option is to dig up a bit of the rhizome and chop it into bits. Every bit that has an eye can be planted and will grow into a banana plant.
But it takes longer than growing banana suckers. Plant your bits or suckers in your well prepared banana patch, keeping two to five metres between them. The spacing depends on your layout. My bananas grow in a block of several double rows. Within the double rows the spacing is two to three metres, now with two plants in each position, suckers of the initial plant. My double rows are four to five metres apart. I also have a banana circle around an outdoor shower with two metres at the most between individual plants, and they are growing in a haphazard way.
If you have just a single clump of a few banana plants you can put them even closer together. Keep your banana plants moist but not too wet in the early days or they may rot. They don't have leaves yet to evaporate water, so they don't need a lot of it. The most common cause of death for bananas is lack of water. The most common cause for not getting fruit is starvation. Banana plants blow over in strong winds. Protect them and feed them and water them and all will be well.
Other than that bananas don't need much maintenance. You get bigger fruit if you remove all unwanted suckers, only keeping the best one. After the initial planting you can leave two on healthy, vigorous plants. Beyond that it is better to keep one sucker per plant on average.
Otherwise your patch will become too crowded. The best suckers are the ones with the small, spear shaped leaves, NOT the pretty ones with the big round leaves! A sucker that is still fed by the mother plant does not need to do much photosynthesis, so it doesn't need to produce big leaves. And a sucker that is well looked after by the mother plant will produce better fruit and be stronger than one that had to struggle on its own. A mature plantation is pretty much self mulching.
Just throw all the leaves and old trunks etc. You can also grow other plants in the understory to produce more mulch. I use cassava, sweet potato and crotolaria.
You just need to sprinkle on some fertiliser every now and then, to replace what you took out of the system when you took the bananas. Bananas are high in potassium, so ideally the fertiliser should be, too.
Keep the fertiliser close to the trunk as bananas don't have big root systems. You may see your first flower emerge after about six months , depending on the weather. Leave the leaves around it, especially the one protecting the top bend of the stalk from sunburn!
As the purple flower petals curl back and drop off they reveal a "hand" of bananas under each. Each banana is a "finger". You may get anything between four to a dozen or more full hands.
Then, under the next petal, you'll see a hand of teeny weeny excuses for bananas. Those are the male fingers. The male fingers just dry and drop off. Only the stalk remains. If you let it grow it will eventually reach the ground. You may have to prop your plant or bunch as the fruit grows heavier to prevent it falling over. There are a number of pest problems and diseases that can affect banana plants and biosecurity is a huge issue for the Australian banana industry.
Nematodes, weevils, and thrips are the most common pests while anthracnose, rhizome soft rot, banana leaf rust, leaf speckle and crown rot are common diseases. Serious diseases like bunchy top and panama disease have been known to wipe our entire farms and are closely monitored by authorities. How to turn banana peels into fertiliser for your indoor plants. Growing figs: Learn how to grow a fig tree. This is the correct way to peel a banana.
Get your mag delivered! Getty Images. Varieties There are two main varieties of bananas grown in Australia — Cavendish and ladyfinger. Cavendish bananas growing in tropical northern Queensland Getty. Lauren Williamson Lauren Williamson is a digital writer, editor and social media fiend who's a huge fan of tackling new wellness trends, eating her way through foreign countries and getting worked up over politics.
Get more from Better Homes and Gardens. Magazine Subscription Offer Get your mag delivered! Wild banana trees still exist, and they have plenty of seeds. Wild bananas are also much smaller than the fruit we enjoy today. Over the course of centuries, bananas were domesticated and bred to have bigger fruit with smaller seeds until we eventually reached the varieties grown today.
Banana trees mainly reproduce through suckers, also called pups. These pups appear to be separate, smaller trees growing next to the adult tree, but they are actually an offshoot from the roots of that tree.
This means they are actually the same plant attached at the roots. Banana trees produce pups as part of reproduction but also to increase the general surface area of the plant so they can absorb more light and water. Once these pups are three to four feet tall, they can be separated from the adult plant.
After separation, the pups can be planted on their own. This method has benefits and drawbacks. It is generally faster and more reliable than growing from seed, and takes less overall work than grafting. However, since each pup is a clone of the mature plant it came from, it decreases the overall genetic diversity of the larger banana population.
This leaves bananas vulnerable to diseases, since it takes much longer for the species to develop disease resistances. Most of the bananas that produce edible fruit are cold hardy up to USDA zone 9. In colder regions, they thrive indoors during the cold seasons. In fact, the Dwarf Cavendish banana was developed in English greenhouses in the mids.
But they need six or more hours of sunlight daily and a long, warm growing season to set and ripen their fruit. On the other hand, Musa basjoo, or Japanese banana, is recognized as the most cold-hardy banana. Mature plants may even flower and produce fruit, but the fruit is inedible.
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