Gabe15

As promised earlier, the catalog and trip report are finally available from the Bougainville PNG collecting expedition I was a member of last year. Enjoy!


https://sites.google.com/a/cgxchange...papuanewguinea

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Growing bananas in Colorado, Washington, Hawaii since 2004. Commercial banana farmer, 200+ varieties.

edwmax

The link goes to a java text file.

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Gabe15

Which link? The one in this post or the ones on the linked page? Everything seems to work from my end .

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Growing bananas in Colorado, Washington, Hawaii since 2004. Commercial banana farmer, 200+ varieties.

Kegas76

That Nono(1) is crazy looking. I would love to see that in person.

I was surprised by the variety of plants with white/green bells.

beam2050

workd for me. excellent reading, very interesting.

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npk of wood ash 0/1/3 to 0/3/7

npk of banana leaf ash 1.75/0.75/0.5

meizzwang

All the links work on this side. Fantastic report, thanks for sharing! Out of everything that was collected, any possibility for some new cold hardy cultivars? Also, out of all the "new" landrace varieties you tried, can you describe the range of flavors for the desert type bananas?

edwmax

Your posted link. The page show briefly, then changes to the html text when stopped finished loading. ... The page will hold if I hit esc while loading stopping other java scripts. This may be a google problem or bad script. Can you post the direct link to the report?

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druss

Awesome was waiting for this ��

subsonicdrone

two or three bananas the size of snarkie's arm!?

Gabe15

Must be a problem on your end, so I don't know how to fix that, but here are the links directly:

catalog: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6W...ew?usp=sharing

report: https://drive.google.com/a/cgxchange...ew?usp=sharing


It's highly doubtful any of them would be cold hardy, we were at equatorial lowland tropics. There were varieties there I saw which are commonly known outside of that region, and some of those have some hardiness, but as for the most unique local types, other similar ones which have been grown in colder climates have not faired well.

I didn't have too many dessert fruits, most of what we collected were typically better for cooking and were not harvested as they are the personal garden plants of the people who donated the plants, and often the bunches weren't ready to be harvested. I bought as many I could in the markets and tried them all, most of the dessert varieties were common, but of the unique ones I'd say the most interesting was one which appeared to be somewhat Iholena-like, but the fruit was very firm and could almost be described as crunchy in a way.

I had more cooked varieties, and my favorite was 'Nesuri', it was very smooth and flavorful, thick but soft in texture if that makes sense, almost like a waxy potato. The fruits were also very large and easy to work with.

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Growing bananas in Colorado, Washington, Hawaii since 2004. Commercial banana farmer, 200+ varieties.

HMelendez

Thanks Gabe for sharing/posting this awesome information, report!.....

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Island Brah

Really awesome, Gabe! Did your team uncover any super fast fruiting types that could rival the Veinte Cohol in that regard?

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Growing: Basjoo, Blue Java (The Real One), FHIA-01 American Goldfinger, Manzano, Tall Orinoco, Raja Puri (USDA TARS), Veinte Cohol (USDA TARS), Patupi, & SH-3640 High Noon (USDA TARS)

Gabe15

Maybe, but we weren't there to watch them grow, so we have no way of telling that kind of stuff when collecting. Some donors reported insanely fast fruiting for many of the varieties, but I think it was mostly a combination of planting large suckers, the fact that everything grows fast there, and a casual prespective of the flow of time. Over the next two years everything will be evaluated in a field collection and all of the important agronomic information will be recorded.

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Growing bananas in Colorado, Washington, Hawaii since 2004. Commercial banana farmer, 200+ varieties.

geissene

The Nono banana looks amazing, like somebody took a can of pink spray paint to the leaves! I'd soo love to grow that someday.

I can imagine that this takes significant effort to collect the plants and then study them. So much diversity on one island! Looks like the local people were very helpful.

Erik

Julian

Awesome