On the Occasion of the anniversary of 20 Years of bananas.org and my 20 Years on board, I want to share my experience with growing edible bananas in Switzerland.
I was mostly influenced by very excitening storries, guidelines and advises I had found here!
Ok, here we go.
It was after reading here on the forum about growing and fruiting bananas in the far north. Overwintering bare rooted in the basement and so on. Then I ordered many different varieties, tiny tissue cultered plants from agristarts to europe, becouse I just could not find hardy typs such as dwarf orinoco or dwarf brazilian here in europe.
After learning the hard way, that our climate is just way too cold for edible bananas I slowly surrendered.
Until mabe 10 Years later a very generous member named abnshrek was willing to send me a pup of his california gold!
Then together with a namwah and veinte cohol that an italian friend, (pancrazio, also a member here) had given me, I tried a second round. But again no success. Overwintering was my biggest problem.
At least the california gold lived on. I gave a pup to pancrazio and he distributed it to many italien friends which are all very happy with it.
Now is my third round. ��
Meanwhile I own a poly tunnel and planted out a california gold and dwarf namwah this spring.
So far they are very happy and really love the high humidity inside. But winter is coming soon and I am going to leave them in ground. My plan is to build a cage around the banana at least one or one and a half feet away from the pseudostem and fill it up with stuffed straw.
I don't expect temperature below -8 Celsius inside the tunnel, but I will wrap a heating cable around the pseudostem, monitor the temperature and make sure no frost can do any harm.
Here they are today:
dwarf namwah
california gold
