Thread: Water suckers
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Old 05-21-2019, 02:05 PM   #195 (permalink)
PR-Giants
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Default Re: Water suckers

There's a lot of misinformation in this thread.

It would have been nice to see one of the junior experts realize this without Gabe having to point this out.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Gabe15 View Post

However, in my experience water suckers really have no disadvantages ...


As Keith mentioned earlier in this thread, any size sucker can be separated and rooted and grown into healthy plants, they just require proper care.
This is important to understand and it also explains some of the misinformation in this thread

Quote:
Originally Posted by Gabe15 View Post

I normally prefer to propagate from the smallest suckers I can find ...

you have total control over their health from a very young age, and by the time you plant them out in the field they are well rooted and ready to explode in growth.
For experienced growers having "total control over their health from a very young age" is a good thing.

For less experienced growers having "total control over their health from a very young age" could be a bad thing which then leads to all these nonsense posts about water suckers being inferior.

If you do not properly care for the water suckers because you believe them to be inferior, then they will not perform well but that is a self-fullfilling prophecy.





I also prefer to propagate from the smallest suckers I can find and that includes water suckers because they produce larger bunches than large sword suckers.

Here's an easy example to understand and you'll see that this small water sucker produced a bunch more than 3 times larger than what the local United States Tropical Research Station averages. This water sucker produced a plant that was shorter than what the research station averages but the pseudostem was more than twice as fat. Most of our bunches are larger than the local research station and that's mainly because they rely on chemical fertilizers and we do not. We rely solely on top mulch for feeding our bananas.

A friend sent me this large Dwarf Orinoco sword sucker after I specifically asked for a small sucker. I waited for large sword sucker to produced an offshoot which turned out to be the water sucker with the red arrow pointed at it and that is the banana I grew. I removed all of the following suckers and when it was developed enough the mother plant was removed.

Quote:
Originally Posted by PR-Giants View Post


Huge suckers are low quality planting material and produce small bunches compared to what a small sucker would produce under proper growing conditions. This is my first time growing an Orinoco and wanted the first bunch to be very large so I decided to grow the water sucker in the photo with the red arrow.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PR-Giants View Post
I got this huge Dwarf Orinoco on a trade and planted it on the ground today.

Can't wait to make some traditional alcapurria.

Quote:
Originally Posted by PR-Giants View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by PR-Giants View Post
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Last edited by PR-Giants : 05-21-2019 at 02:09 PM.
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