harveyc

Realistically, it's not very practical to try to grow bananas for fruit in your climate, IMO. Still, many of us do things for the challenge and that is much of the fun of it. Besides the time for getting a bunch to ripen, it takes many more months for the plant to get to the point to produce a flower to begin with. Most of my bananas have taken three years to fruit and that's in USDA zone 9b. The first year is getting established and get to maybe four feet tall or a little more. The next year they might get tall enough to flower but that is less than ideal for me since it would be late in the summer or early fall and the bunch would never develop/mature. Ideally, at the end of the second year it is large enough to be close to flowering and will flower by June. For all of this to happen, the plant must withstand the two winters and stay alive, albeit with all of the leaves killed from frost/freezes. In your climate, the chances of a killing freeze are much greater, though the corm of some varieties would survive. If you are able to add big amounts of insulation somehow (some people have put wire cages around the pseudostem and filled the cage with leaves while another hobbyist from Utah built foam boxes around his plants and heated the enclosure with a light bulb), you might be able to do it but you would probably be better off with some type of Orinoco.

I'll soon post a photo of one of my California Gold (probably a form of Dwarf Orinoco) that is beginning to flower. It threw out maybe four leaves before the flower bud emerged so it will be a bit hard for the bunch to develop properly. Still, I had another unknown variety that flowered back in March or so and has no leaves but is looking fairly good.

__________________