katykat
07-05-2017, 02:54 PM
This is a bit long--please bear with me; I am a total banana newbie. We put in a pool and planted an ice cream banana--about 4 ft tall-- last November. This is Houston area (8B), but the temp dropped to 25F for several night in a row about six weeks later and my poor ice cream lost all its leaves. Thanks to this forum, we crossed fingers and waited to see what spring would bring. The original plant put out new leaves and started growing. A very vigorous pup soon appeared and outgrew its parent. The pup is now about 8 ft at the top of the stem/trunk and around 12-13 ft at its highest leaf. The parent plant is about 3 feet shorter. Together, they have 6-7 smaller pups that range between 1 and 4 ft tall growing up against them. Today, I raked back the mulch around them to fertilize (for the first time) and discovered a plethora of pups sprouting along the roots of both of the largest plants. What do you recommend I do at this point? It looks like we're on the way to having a banana forest and that's not what we want. I'd love to get fruit, although that's not our top priority (pretty poolside landscape comes first). It would be nice to transplant a few of these bananas, but not all of them. Should we cut some down to allow the largest ones to get more nutrients? Other advice? Thanks for reading all the way through this post and for any suggestions!