JoeReal

Our area is marginally freezing Zone 9 with maritime influence. I will attempt this year to see if I can save the banana leaves from winter injuries. So below is the plan. I will post pics on the progress of this project later and how it turns out by spring time.

I purchased the sunscreen patio shade cover from Home Depot to be installed over my bananas. The 6 ft x 20 ft roll is $30. This patio cover blocks 75% of the sunlight, mildew resistant, and guaranteed to last 15 years. We seldom go below 22 deg F, so frost protection over the top should be enough. Counter-intuitive that it blocks the sun, so you might say. Actually, that is my intent of shading out partially the sun during winter. It is not only the freezing injury from frosts that could damage tropicals like bananas, it is the chilling injury.

Chilling injury comes about when you have a lot of sunshine in very chilly air temperature, something above freezing to 45 deg F. In this case, banana leaves will suffer tremendous damage, even much more than frosts at times due to the combined effect of sunlight and chilly air. What happens is that the Choloroplasts gets fired up or electrons gets excited from the bombardment of sunlight, but the rest of the photosynthetic team is asleep due to low metabolic activities caused by low temperature. With the captured energy nowhere to go, it creates free radicals that ran rampant in the leaf tissues and damage a lot of cells, the end results are fried banana leaves.

When shading the bananas out during the winter sunshine, I hope to preserve their leaves as long as it doesn't go below 24 deg F this winter, I should be okay, and no need to build a greenhouse either, and hope to get away with this.