Quote:
Originally Posted by PR-Giants
This is a myth that pops up often, removing the pups now will not stress the plant and will not lead to loss of the bunch.
Here's an easy way to understand this, if the pups were killed by destroying their growing point it would have no effect on the plant or bunch, and removing them is not much different.
Here's a SH-3640 in an 80 gallon pot that had a huge pup removed while it was flagging and the plant will produce a normal bunch as expected. I do this all of time and the only thing different with this situation is that there are many large plants in this pot. The FHIA-21 in the photo is one of two ratoon crop followers of a recently harvested mother plant.
The size of the pup removed was similar to the 2' Manini pup pictured below.
Santa Claus can damage the plant & bunch while parking his sleigh, but he should also have the capability to park his sleigh without damaging the plant & bunch.
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You're right in that if done carefully, and only removing one sucker you won't do much damage to the plant, but the reality is that removing suckers invariably also destroys some roots coming from the mother corm, which is very stressful to that shoot during fruiting as it is not in a vegetative growth stage, and any amount of stress will affect the fruit development to some degree. If you have a lot of experience removing suckers, it can be done with minimal damage, but most people are not that experienced at it and often do a messy job, so as a general guideline I always advise to just wait until the plant is done fruiting unless there is some pressing need to get suckers immediately. Loss of the bunch can come from many different sources, including altering the structural integrity of the root system which is anchoring in the mat in the ground, I have seen cases where too many suckers were removed from a fruiting plant, which damaged a lot of roots in the process and led to the mother plant falling over. The issue isn't whether or not there are suckers present, the issue is damaging roots, and this case, what was suggested was to remove the mat from the pot and separate everything out, which is very different than what you have described, carefully removing a single small sucker.
Also you must consider this not an optimum situation in a tropical environment, bananas in a greenhouse in a less-than ideal environment behave very differently from the tropics, everything is slowed down and they are much more sensitive to stressful situations. I have grown many bananas in both situations for years.