Banana Varieties
 

What are your favorite varieties? Pros/Cons?

Senorita banana.
Pros: rapid growing, 3 months to bloom from pup. 2-3 months to ripen fruit, beautiful red stem, thin skin, small fruit, very sweet, quick ripening, ideal for sundaes or ice cream, short stem too. Very productive, large potential of quick fruiting variety in the US.
Major Con: I don't have it here in California. I have loads of it in my small lot in the Philippines. Would be excited to see if the taste would change in our weird climate compared to the tropics.
Conditional: depending upon your purpose: thin skin (attracts birds readily), quick ripening means shorter shelf life.

My preference may soon change after I tasted all the cultivars that will fruit in my yard. Our cold temperature prolongs my excitement, as it takes 3 times as much, and the timing of the bloom should be about right.

what do you do for a living joe?

To finance my expensive hobbies, I work as the VP of our Software R&D. Used to be involved with academic and basic research in Rice, expert systems, crop modelling, GIS, crop production, agromet and have produced several internationally refereed publications more than 15 years ago. Now I make all kinds of applications program with my team of programmers. Corporate ERPS, online banking, fraud detection, Automated Clearing Houses, OFAC and SDN, etc. I am heading a team of programmers in our small company.

Amazing Joe!!!

:eek: wWOW

hey could somebody please show me how to graft, in detail... I understand the concept and pretty much how to do it but i would like to try and do a graft of something> Could somebody post step by step instructions and make that a sticky at the top of the page!

Here's my photo illustrated very simple but very effective cleft grafting:

http://albums.photo.epson.com/j/Albu...&a=31606026&f=

Very good on plums, apples, cherries.

When to do this: During budswell in late winter to early spring.

I find 'Gold Finger' gives the most bang for tha buck. Mine always produces large racemes and has a good eating out of hand quality. The tree itself is not to out of proportion with height and takes most of our wind here without extra support.

Good for Marc and all the people in Florida. You folks will always have bigger bunches and sweeter citruses than us here in the colder winter and hotter summer Northern California.

Musa 'Rose' (AA Group)- A short, slender plant with beautiful rose red pseudostems that will provide you with more then enough suckers (up to 50 in 2 years) and has a rock solid roots system with some of the toughest roots in the genus to really hold it down during those high winds. Not only is it rated as one of the best tasting dessert bananas, but it is also highly disease resistant to most anything you may encounter (Fusarium wilt, Sigatokas and others). It is a great choice for container growing and easily grows in (at least, but I think you can even go smaller) an 18" container (which I am doing now with amazing results). Its an all around great banana and will be the first in a series of hybrid experiments I will be conducting in the near to future in an attempt to create a banana that Im sure everyone will benefit from.

However- of all the bananas, I really like the wild species best and could never settle on a favorite among those.

Gabe - any thoughts on selling a couple of your musa rose pups?

My musa rose have completely died down during the winter and never sprouted back. They are cold sensitive. Will not try to grow them again.

thats all relative though, mine have done absolutly fine in 40° without any damage or slowing, it reallt depends on climate a lot. It is however hardier then the other bananas with lots of red in the pseudostems, such as 'Jamaican Red', 'Kru' and any 'Iholene'.

I do have one extra Musa 'Rose' pup if anyone is interested that is rooted and growing by itself. Let me know.

Here's my one-time unreplicated experiment in my backyard (partial list, as far as I can recall from my many plants):

Kru, Monkey Fingers, Ilohene, Lakatan, Rose (planted in the ground), Hi Color Mini, are among my potted bananas that have died completely in their pots after I intentionally left all my bananas out in the winter. These are the ones that I will not attempt to grow until I can obtain a cheap but efficient greenhouse.

Those whose pseudostems rotted away to the soil level but have sprouted back, I will keep them in pots, these are the ones that will very rarely fruit if ever, perhaps when we get one of those very warm winter event. These are the Cavendishes (Dwarf, Grand Nain, SDC, Mauritius), Kofi, Enano gigante, Cocos, Saba (maybe too small yet), Cardaba (maybe too small yet), Sumatrana cross.

Those whose leaves died out but pseudostems remained intact and alive then grew back from the pseudostem height, I grew them in the ground, they will have fruiting potentials in the backyard and these are California Gold, Orinoco's (dwarf and Tall), Namwahs(dwarf and tall), Brazilian (Dwarf and Tall), Misi Luki, Williams, GoldFinger, Raja Puri, Sweetheart, FHIA-17, Apple Manzano, Ice Cream, Texas Star.

For the non-edible or non-palatable: Sikkimensis - did not have any leaf damage the entire winter and it frosted several times, not a fast grower though but very decent looking form. Basjoo - only leaves are destroyed during the winter and grows fast very quickly, fruits are far from palatable, too seedy. Zebrinas - these dies back to the ground level but resprouts every mid-spring.

Thats odd, usually Cavendish are less hardy then Rose, but it all depends on everything basically. My Cavendish was much slower in the cold then Rose and even got leaf damage at about 45°F. And others who i have talked to also found Rose to be hardier then Cav's. But in general your obseravtions match up with what is usually found.

One of the factors perhaps is the size of the plant. My Musa rose was still young and small, only about 3 ft tall at the trunk when it was left out for mother nature. This was unreplicated, so not really a valid scientific study, just for my own curiosity. The pattern of winter could influence various responses. Our winters are generally gradually cooling in most years, that is why our citruses harden more than their published cold tolerances, and I am suspecting that this would not be true for our bananas here. Our winter would be miserable for bananas because it is the time when we receive most of our moisture in the form of cold rains that could easily rot away the corms in the ground, but I have placed plastic liners to keep them on the dry side which apparently did not help.

Was your Musa Rose a pup or tissue cultured plant? Would a pup tend to be more cold hardy because it has an established corm? How long does it take a tissue cultured plant to develop a corm?

It was a pup that I got in an exchange, I got two pups in the trade and gave away one to a friend (that one also died). When it was a pup, it got a hard time starting up. First the pseudostem died back to the ground level, then in the middle of very hot late summer, two full months after it was planted, it started to grow, it reached about 3 ft in the fall, then died back during the first frost and never came back. Perhaps there might be microbial strains in our area that this type of banana became susceptible when it got colder, that is why the corm died during the wet winter. But the plant when it was at its peak, is truly lovely to look at.