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Old 12-04-2022, 05:47 PM   #8 (permalink)
TheVeggieProfessor
 
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Default Re: Bunchy top paranoia

Thanks to everyone for your responses so far. Here are my responses to the comments:

Quote:
Originally Posted by all43 View Post
What is your feeding/ watering regime?
Pretty much n/a I pile arborist chips all around them and bury food scraps.


Quote:
Looks similiar to a mosiac type virus.
Do the other plants affected in your landscape include colocasia/alocasia perhaps?
I don't have any other affected plants in my landscape, but also don't have any colocasia/alocasia


Quote:
I have a few friends in Florida and never had bunchy top and have gotten a bunch of bananas from them and around no issues. Would be pretty rare for you to have it. If you feed to heavy or something is off in the soil that will happen…
I doubt I've been feeding too heavy. Just arborist chips and food scraps/coffee grounds. The other thing is that it happened all around the same time to bananas of different ages. Some 2 years old, some only a few months. All down my hedge and then the same symptoms started to appear in a banana further away in my front yard.


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BBTV isn't known to be present in FL, so if you had it you would be the first ever, which is extraordinarily unlikely.


In looking at your photos, you definitely do not have BBTV. To me it looks like either one of two things, calcium and/or boron deficiency (they present very similar symptoms and can also occur in tandem), or Cucumber mosaic virus which infects a wide variety of plants and occasionally jumps to bananas.

Have you had healthy mature plants thrive and fruit in your exact location before, or are all of the plants you see it on new and young? I ask because if you've been able to have healthy vigorous plants growing in your location with your practices before, it's highly unlikely for a nutrient deficiency to randomly pop up (unless you introduced a new practice or additive to the soil), which would point to CMV potentially, whereas if they are all young plants and this is your first time growing then your soil may not be amended correctly for bananas.
This happened to nearly all bananas growing in my hedge and one in the front yard too, farther away from the hedge. Some of the bananas were up to 2 years old and fine. They all started declining at the same time. My next door neighbor has had a mat of bananas in her backyard for years with no feeding or watering at all and is not affected. Her banana might as well be part of my (former) hedge. I think the odds that a nutrient deficiency popped up in different spots of my yard at the same time is pretty low.

I trust your judgment that it's not bunchy top. Thanks for setting my mind at ease.
Though much like bunchy top, it appears that CMV has no cure. Which brings me back to my original question. If I removed a banana that was infected with CMV, then touched mulch, and put that mulch on my new bananas, is that likely to spread the disease?
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