We’re going to eat some of our own, home-grown bananas this year! (Crossing fingers that everything goes well…). Honestly, I had pretty much given up hope that we’d have edible bananas from our plants, even though I’d seen some bunches on other banana plants in the area before.
You may recall that we had a banana flower emerge a couple years ago on Christmas Eve. Not a great time for a tropical fruit flower to emerge, am I right? I tried to protect that one with heaters under the clump on a couple of freezing January nights, and then a rough windstorm kicked up and broke the stem right over. We kinda figured protecting developing bananas in the winter was going to be a losing game.
But look! We discovered a flower on July 6th. Now, this seems like it’s early enough to ripen before winter! At least we hope so. This article says they ripen in four to six months. Four would be awesome. Six gets us into December, so if it takes that long, we’ll just keep an eye on the weather and harvest it before any nighttime freezes come.
Here are a few more shots. The first two are when the flower first appeared in early July, and the last one is today (late August). I’ve been a bit concerned that the new flowers that appear every day haven’t been turning into bananas, but I think what I’m reading says that only the first flowers turn into bananas (they’re self-fertile female flowers), and subsequent ones are solely male flowers that don’t produce fruit. Not sure how that works on an evolutionary scale (like, how do they produce any seeds? Do they not need seed, since they spread from their roots? Hmmmm…).
When to Harvest
Anyway, they say to harvest while still green and they’ll ripen in storage. If you let them go too long, they become tempting for rodents that will climb up and eat them (we do have rats that come around, plus plenty of squirrels). Here’s a useful article on when to harvest and how.
Home-grown bananas! Yay! I’ll keep you posted about how these turn out this fall/winter!
Feeding and Watering
I can’t say I’m an expert on these — I’m just learning as I go. They say bananas are heavy feeders, and you should give them a fertilizer with pretty balanced ratios like 8-10-8. They can use 1/2 pound or more per month during the growing season. Some say to give them more nitrogen in the spring — you might try just using your favorite lawn fertilizer for that. My preference is always to use organic fertilizers, and it’s important to mix those into the soil (even just scratching in with a little hand rake is OK) around the plants. There’s something about organic fertilizers that doesn’t really activate until they’re mixed with soil — I think it’s because they work in part by having beneficial effects on soil microbes.
Bananas are also said to be heavy drinkers. Water them frequently, but don’t leave them continually soggy or you’ll create root rot.
Honestly, I’m not that great at watering and fertilizing, so I’m pretty amazed I got a flower at such a great time of year! Sometimes I only water once a week, placing a sprinkler near the base of the clump and running it for a half hour or so. I have tried to remember the fertilizer every month, but I don’t always succeed. Doesn’t it sometimes seem that plants surprise you with good results when you stop paying intense attention to them? I don’t know why!