RobG7aChattTN

Welcome! First off, OKC is considered 7a. Most winters you do better than that and maybe even better than 7b. That being said, last winter was more of a 6a/b type of winter and the previous winter was also historically very, very bad. Without enough mulch you probably would have even lost Musa basjoo. Orinocco isn't considered 7b without protection in the form of tons of mulch, bales of hay, bags of leaves, etc. If you leave them out you'll never get fruit as they need 18 months to grow fruit. If you don't care about fruit then you may as well grow Musa basjoo which is more cold hardy. To get fruit on Orinocco you need to preserve the original pseudostem over the winter and cutting a big one down removes the apical meristem that by that point is going to be above where you cut so it will die back and re-sprout from the corm and then you will be looking at another 18 months until they produce fruit. Even folks that bring them in for the winter and store them dormant don't always get fruit and if they do it is usually in the third year since those dormant months don't count toward the 18 months to develop fruit. Sometimes the plants will bloom without enough time to ripen the fruit before winter. In that case, if the bananas are almost ripe, I've heard of people cutting the pseudostem and putting the end in a bucket of water and keeping the cut pseudostem and the fruit warm until the bananas are ripe. No matter what, it isn't easy to ripen bananas out of the warmer climates. I personally gave up and let my Orinoccos and Raja Puris stay out with insufficient mulch for the very cold winter two winters ago and lost them. I'll stick to the ornamentals like basjoo, sikkimensis, and velutina with some promising experimental types like balbisiana, Thai Black, yunnanensis, itinerans, etc. OKC can be very challenging to grow stuff because the weather swings wildly all year and the wind never stops (get used to shredded banana leaves). You can get Musa basjoo at TLC nursery in OKC or from someone here on the board. Good Luck!