Originally Posted by meizzwang

Hi Eddie,

I'm about a 30 minute drive south of San Francisco, CA. This year, my climate has been a bit less than ideal for bananas: we had a cool spring and many weeks of cold summers followed by a few heat waves here and there. Overall, the FHIA-1 isn't thriving like it did a few years ago, but it's still producing several bunches. In fact, it produces bunch after bunch after bunch, but if the timing is off (ie. the blooms open in September thru April), those bunches don't make it to maturity. There's really a small window by which the bananas will successfully mature, and that also depends on the weather during any given year. 30 minutes south of where I am in San Jose, CA, FHIA 1 would probably be my top choice because it's warm enough there that you can probably get more bunches to mature.

Now that I've grown several varieties here for a while, I'd much rather choose pisang ceylon over FHIA-1 under these cool conditions: it still grows decently fast with marginal weather, and the flavor is arguably as good if not better! Pisang Ceylon fruits so much faster too: about 5 months from bloom to harvest. this means there's a higher chance that every bunch that forms will reach maturity and not get taken out by the cold weather. Only downside is that the pseudostems almost always fall over without propping, and they get really, really tall...FHIA 1 can also get very, very tall, but the pstems almost never fall over.