Corm propagation a success
 

A month ago I cut up a tall red banana corm into four pieces after removing two suckers. Each piece had a "node" or bump like the start of a sucker. Well a month later and one new sucker has emerged. I am amazed but it was a rather large corm so it must have had a lot of "energy" stored. Nothing yet on the other three but I will post pics when and if they produce something.

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

how did you cut it? directly down the middle crosswise like full quarters? I was thinking of trying that this passed summer on one of my SDC's but failed to do so.

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

I cut it from the top down to the bottom. In other words standing above the corm with roots touching the ground and cut stem facing up I sliced down to the ground to create two pieces each with two nodes and then cut those pieces slicing between the nodes.


Here is a good link to another post on the subject with some pictures.
http://www.bananas.org/f2/propagatio...ting-8556.html

Another picture of all four quarters

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

That's interesting. I didn't know that splitting the corm would still allow it to grow.

I know bananas are fairly hardy. I've cut suckers which didn't look like they should survive, but they surprisingly did.

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

what is the chance that the original meristem is intact enough to still grow out? Would the parent plant still survive if you simply cut the 4 areas off of the main corm that has the "eyes" maybe an inch or so from the meristem?
Just a thought, cuz if you were going for more plants then keeping the parent would effectively mean keeping one more.

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

Everyday I am amazed by the hardiness of the banana plant. I have had two Gran Nain suckers rot on me only to find a few weeks later two more suckers per original plant emerge. They say this method of corm cutting actually increases the yield of new suckers since some of the nodes will not develop if you don't force their hand by dissecting the corm.
Anyway I am just happy I have one extra plant from the experiment and hopefully more to come.

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

I remember reading about some of the Ensete group about a year or so ago on here, that the only two ways to get pups from ventricosums, ventricosi, ventricosas (however the plural spelling is) is that you wait for them to flower and die and pup or one person actually sacrificed their maurelli and chopped it down to the ground level and took a big honkin knife and cut it about 2/3's of the way through crosswise through the meristem and it actually pupped through the cuts instead of the outer edge of the corm like most nanners. I'll have to go find that thread now.....

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

You can certainly do this with Ensete Ventricosum Maurelli
I spilt one into three last year and several pups sprouted from each segment. Here they are a couple of weeks after the split.

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

I love it. It is like getting extra banana plants for free. Thanks for the pics.

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

Three of the four corm pieces now have shoots. The one that has not quite broken through the soil actually has two shoots coming up.

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

Anybody tried this with an AeAe before?

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

I know if I spent $150 - $250 buck on an Ae Ae, I would be hard pressed to try such a tactic considering the high possibility of rot. But there are peeps that have quite a collection of them that may wanna try this.

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

I wish I could buy/import banana plants, we only have five different cultivars here in Bermuda. It is illegal to import them even if they are phytosanitary.

As an experiment I am going to try quartering the corm of my manzano after it's fruit ripens. I have a flag leaf coming out now. I am actually going to leave it in the ground this time and slice with a knife as deep as I can get the knife. It will be a "blind" division of the nodes but may save some work.

On the rot point I removed as much of the pstem material as I could so it left mostly the corm. The corm seems quite rot resistant because these were left out in the rain many times, during the fall and we have very high humidity here. I am going to unearth the fourth corm piece to check for sucker growth (i am impatient), but none of the four pieces had any rot.

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

Congratulations on your success:birthdaynana:!

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

Wish me luck! I just started to try it with my California Gold corm. The pstem died over the winter, but the corm was intact, but I didn't want to wait until one little sucker makes it through. I hope this way there will be more little CaliGolds soon!

The image shows the five pieces after a rough cleaning. They were potted after further cleaning and soaking them in a fungicide-solution to prevent rotting! I put them on a heat mat. The pic is not that good, because I was to close.

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

When I did it, I just cut wedges, with an "eye" like this:

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

When I did it, I cut wedges from the corm like this:

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

Good Luck BB73!
My four corm quarters each produced a healthy plant from their nodes. I found the larger the corm slice the healthier the plant. My next will be a Manzano and then a Dwarf Cavendish.
As an side, one of the pots with my quartered corm had a compost/soil mix and as a result I ended up with three strawberry and a blackberry plant growing in the same pot.
The heat mat is a good idea, sometimes on sunny days I put my (black) pots in the sun. A few hours in direct sun really heated up the pot and soil simulating more growing season type heat.
I would love to see pics of the progress. It took a month or so before I saw any growth emerge.
Keep us posted.

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

Thanks guys!

I think I did something right (or at least nothing wrong) so far:
Officially claiming to check on any signs of rot, but honestly I was just curious if this all works. So I removed the soil around all 5 pieces of the CaliGold corm and checked. The one piece, that I identified before as the most promising, is just pushing a shoot from the fraction as if it was still the whole corm. That tiny little white thing on the tip of the eye has been grown since I replanted it after cutting it - just four days ago!

By the way: I wasn't only curious. I really did spray some fungicide :-)

And on the other pieces no growth is visible. But I think I have at least one more piece left, that looks very promising.

Re: Corm propagation a success
 

Looks like a great start. You will start to see roots grow too. The sucker will begin to turn into or grow its own corm. Good luck and keeps the pics coming.