I hope Ron founded his Orinoco. I'm already sure 99% my big banana plant is Orinoco(asked in the ID thread last summer about it).
My experience with this kind of bananas is the pups are too close to mother plant and its not so easy to make them to push roots after digging/cuting - they even haven't nor 1 root, or have 2-3 very short and propose still non-functional roots.
From 4 very big pups the plant produced last summer(and a half of dozen another little more) i have only one "for sure" established in a pot(i'm happy - they are 2, but one of them is too little) - the first big (4 ft) sucker, I cute off from the corm in July, died, but from his particular corm survived 1.5-2-inch "partition-corm" with 2 germ-pups. I haven't so big hope that they will survive in the middle of the summer, but put them in 22 cm pot(7-8 inches) and leaved it on a arbitrariness of Jully sun : ))
The next week there was nice surprise - it sprouted and began to rise. Now I have in that pot one "double" plant baby-Orinoco(already 1 ft tall!) and my "minimum plan" to produce another 3 plants of
that kind for next summer is near to the success
The other 3 pups destiny is: one give to the neighbor in a village(hope will establish well), another 2 are in the pots but to this moment they just stay in the condition I cut them respectively 2 and 1 months ago: they have green leafs but the spear doesn't grow or maybe 2-3 mms only.
So, my experience for my first summer about this banana(Orinoco): Extremely good grower(you can compare photos in my album here), just inloved in it, but pup propagation is not so easy like S.Dwarf Cavendish(ha-ha!
) or even Basjoo.
On the other hand Orinoco incur significantly better(much, much better!) the very hot and dry this-year summer condition in compare to Basjoo. Now will be interesting will he do the same the winter(we know the answer
)
Sorry about this long thread
Just will put the photo of new Orinoco-double-pup in afternoon.