New guy from Tennessee
 

Hi everyone,

I just bought my first banana starts from Florida Hill Nursery. They are Raja Puri and Ice Cream.

I live at 1800 ft on the Cumberland Plateau in TN. The climate here kills a lot of plants hardier than bananas. The Warm/Freeze, Warm/Freeze cycle of our winters is brutal to most tree fruits I try to grow.

I have had dozens of plants die over the winters. Pears, Cherries, Plums, Peaches die easily in their first winter. Even apples get burst bark from freezing sometimes.


I'm not quitting though, in fact I'm adding to my collection! Bananas!

What kind of reputation does Florida Hill Nursery have? I ordered elephant ears from them before and was satisfied, but I think they sent me the wrong elephant ear this time and they won't reply to my emails.

I would like to be able to grow a short season banana that I can dig up and overwinter indoors, either dormant or under grow lights and put it out in Late April/May and have ripe bananas by first frost in October.



Some more about me:

I am a bit of a fruit collector, and still collecting despite my climate(or is it myself?) killing a good third of what I plant. I've only been at it for 3 or 4 years.

I'm a fig nut. I was a member of the Figs4Fun forum before it shut down, and am a member at the new OurFigs.com forum. I have over 60 fig trees in the ground and am selecting for figs that will bear fruit in a single season after freezing to the ground and growing back from the roots.

My other tropicals that I have to take in during the winters are Dragon Fruit(too many. I need to get rid of some), Guava, Australian Finger lime, Papaya.

In ground I have Apples of all sorts, Seedless Che, Seaberries, Raspberries of all colors, Primocane Blackberries, Quince(Doing surprisingly well), Jujubes, Rabbiteye Blueberries, Muscadines(climate kills about half of varieties), LOTS of pawpaws, (That's my other obsession, Been trying for 8 years and yet to get the first fruit.), Persimmons, (Half of the Asians dead), Plums, Pears, Cherries, Apricots, Peaches, Pluerries, Pluots, (nearly all dead after 1st Winter)

I feel like I have wasted a lot of money and labor on the things that die and it does get discouraging sometimes, but maybe with the help of the people on this forum I can keep bananas alive and maybe even someday taste my own tree-ripened fruit!:03:

Re: New guy from Tennessee
 

Welcome to the Org. if your wanting specific bananas it is best to buy from an Org. member with verified varieties. i am sure you got healthy plants at a fair price however i am not sure you got what you ordered, time will tell. Look up older posts and you will see a lot of mis marked bananas.
Tennessee is beautiful btw, my daughter lives in Knoxville

happy growing,

Darla

Re: New guy from Tennessee
 

Welcome to the banana gang!......:2723::bananarow::2723:

Re: New guy from Tennessee
 

Welcome to bananas :03:

Re: New guy from Tennessee
 

Thanks, Everybody for welcoming me!

Re: New guy from Tennessee
 

Welcome to bananas! :goteam:

Have you experimented with different rootstocks and grafting yourself on top? You may be able to get cuttings for free at a local scion exchange or even from other fruit fanatics.

I don't have experience in your area at all, but I'm surprised that late frosts kill your trees, I would have expected that to perhaps kill some of the new shoots and flower or such, but not the tree. Is there perhaps something else going on, like waterlogging? Or perhaps you need to get some heavy "floating row cover" to put over new trees for a year or two until they're more established?

NB: I really like Tropical Fruit Forum - International Tropical Fruit Growers - Index outside of bananas, are you there?

Re: New guy from Tennessee
 

I have started trying to monitor what rootstocks do well in my area. Not every nursery I have purchased from displays the rootstocks, but those that do I make note of and check back later. One thing I have noticed is that in regards to Persimmons, those grafted onto Diospyros Virginiana(American Persimmon) seem to survive the winters better than those on Diospyros Lotus(date-plum). Of course that is what one would expect, being that the American Persimmon is native. Still, if the scion is cold sensitive, the native rootstock won't be enough to save it.




It's not just late frosts. It's late freezes. Freezes that come after several nice warm sunny days. The trees wake up and start sap flowing, start leafing out and BAM! 25 degrees and the leaves freeze, the sap freezes under the bark, bursting trunks and killing trees. The temperature swings like crazy here. I remember one year it got to 23 degrees one night and snowed two inches. The next day it got up to 70-something and all the snow was melted before noon!

I'm going to start painting trunks with white latex paint and see if that helps. A floating row cover or insulating each tree is not really an option with the number of trees that I have and my limited time.

I messed up this year and planted some stuff too early. In some ways I didn't have much choice, as the nursery shipped too early and it was either plant them or pot them all and keep them protected until late April, which I didn't really have time for, but I now wish I had, because a late freeze killed all four of the persimmons I planted and two of the four plums I planted.
In the future I will never plant until after last frost unless I know the plant is very cold hardy.

But yes, if the tree is mature, it can take the temperature swings much better. It's the one and two year old trees that are high risk.


I have visited that forum a few times, but am not a member. I'll take another look at it.