BananaGrower1

I live in the desert and the temperatures get below freezing approximately 1 to 5 times per year in the night time only. Right now our highs are in the high 60s and the lows are in the mid to low 40s. Last week I decided to bubble wrap the trunks of my bananas (rajapuri, dwarf cavendish and ICB (maybe fake)) just to be on the safe side. It looks like the trunks are getting black spots on them under the bubble wrap. Is this rot? It is soft to the touch. Should I take the bubble wrap off until temperatures get lower, or take it off for good? Or should I just leave it how it is for the winter. I also piled up a lot of mulch over the bottom 1.5 ft of the trunk.

Abnshrek

Your suffer-cating them.. :^)

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Olafhenny

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Abnshrek

Its the main reason I went to Frost cloth this year versus last year.. I lost 3 stems last year, and killed another..

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hanabananaman

Fellow desert dweller here, I am still learning a lot but I don't think you can get away with wrapping your stem and leaving it that way for the whole winter in our climate. We get many days that are warm enough to cook it under that plastic and cloth is probably safer. A few years ago we were 80F on new years day. I would only wrap them when we get freezes and unwrap them in the late morning. Until the brutal cold spell last winter I easily kept my leaves when my yard dipped to 28F for a short time in early winter. I had about 500 gallons of water in numerous containers spread around the 3 - 8ft plants. I also had the large Christmas lights strung all over and a few catalytic propane heaters that I lit about 4AM. That side of my yard was noticeably warmer to my skin than the 28F on the other side. I let the lights touch the stems last year and that was a mistake, you might get away with the tiny lights touching the stem but the big ones caused deep mushy rotting very quickly. Like you pointed out we get so few freezes each year, that's why I went a little crazy with my efforts because there is so much to gain if you can get them through the winter with leaves intact. We have some winters now and then that I know I could get the leaves through, I hope this is one of those milder winters. Well once the leaves were toast my job got much easier I left some of the upper petioles on to use as supports for the Christmas lights to hang from over the cloth that I wrapped the stem with. One other unrelated thing I have learned is if you are growing in containers with hard water the pots need to be flushed with large amounts of water a couple times each year (at least a couple times). I have a few plants that started to grow well again after I flushed them a few weeks ago. You must follow up with fertilizer right away. My inground plants have done well without flushing because we had a couple of very heavy rains on 2 occasions in the last several months. In Phoenix anything over 1 inch is a heavy rain which does not happen too often. Without those heavy rains I would have considered flushing them as well. Containers are too small to effectively flush with rain given the limited amount we usually get here. If you can gather rain to flush them that would be the best way.
Good luck
Larry

Kat2

Scroll up and read the sage advice from true experts. I'm just into bananas but I've grown many plants; I would never wrap ANYTHING in plastic without a way to wick off the moisture that naturally forms.

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Olafhenny

The only thing I can think of is to place some removable contraptions like the one pictured in
the URL given in my previous post. If you use, like I did ¾ “ irrigation pipe. Then you can pound
4 bamboo post in the ground at the proper spacing and cover them with a frost cloth “tent”.
Caveat: Since frost cloth is probably useless up here, I have never used it and accordingly
have no idea how effective it is down there. You can then stick the four pipe legs over the
bamboo posts and remove them again, all in less that a minute.


Frankly, I doubt, that a couple of hours 28^F would do any harm to the PS. In my experiment…
Experiment: How much cold can a banana take?
…27^F has just singed the exposed leaves. The PS can take much more than that for a brief
period, because it has greater mass for the cold to penetrate. Admittedly that were basjoos, but
I believe that the leaves of all bananas react the same. The difference of hardiness is in the
survival of the corm at low soil temperatures or so I believe. As I winter only basjoos and this
winter an E. Maurelii,
I have no way of experimenting with other cultivars. It would be interesting, if somebody would
risk one of the other cultivars in HZ 8 or 9 and see if it survives. My guess would be, that the leaves
will freeze off during prolonged exposure (several hours) to 27^F or even a bit less, but the thicker
parts of the PS would survive nicely, provided that the corm was protected with a layer of mulch. It
would then re-grow in spring.


In case you chose to go the route I have suggested above you could augment the frost cloth by
tossing a couple of plastic gallon jugs full of hot tab water under the enclosure late at night, when
frost is forecast. Water has a high temperature retention quotient. You can heat a lot of air with
only little water, as you have experienced already. Water is not as hot as your soil gets, when
the sun shines on it in summer and cannot harm the plants with it.

Olaf

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BananaGrower1

Thanks to everyone for all of the great info so far. I did not cut the leafs off of the plants. So tonight I took the bubble wrap off and fortunately there were only a few small areas of rot on the PSs, which I removed.

I bought the Rajapuri in January of last year just before a few bad freezes. The plant made it though that freeze, with all leafs intact, but I had to cover it with a cloth and put a heat lamp nearby to keep it warm.

My hope for this year was to keep them all alive--leafs intact-- without having to go through the hassle of using a heat lamp. And unfortunately they are all too large for me to put a cloth over. I got the bubble wrap idea from a youtube video. A guy in Canada wraps his plants in bubble wrap every year and they always survived (the difference is that he did cut the leafs and some of the plants did die down. I though that if it works in Canada, it would definitely work great here. LOL. I guess not.

One of you guys should do a youtube video showing the right way to overwinter a banana plant for novices like us. Either way. Thanks again, I think I get the point now, and I will adjust my overwintering measure accordingly. If anyone else has any other good advice for desert dwellers growing bananas, I am all ears.

hanabananaman

Olaf thanks for the information. I failed to mention that I have 3 camper stoves that I use to heat pots of water and I agree they do put out a great amount of heat and stay hot long after the propane runs out. I am about to build a small solar water heater to heat the barrels. All the unheated water that keeps things warm all night prevents the area from warming up quickly after sunrise. It stays cold for a little longer unless the water is moved.
Christmas has come early it's raining for first the time in 6-8 weeks, I cant remember exactly how long ago it was.
Larry