katykat

This is a bit long--please bear with me; I am a total banana newbie. We put in a pool and planted an ice cream banana--about 4 ft tall-- last November. This is Houston area (8B), but the temp dropped to 25F for several night in a row about six weeks later and my poor ice cream lost all its leaves. Thanks to this forum, we crossed fingers and waited to see what spring would bring. The original plant put out new leaves and started growing. A very vigorous pup soon appeared and outgrew its parent. The pup is now about 8 ft at the top of the stem/trunk and around 12-13 ft at its highest leaf. The parent plant is about 3 feet shorter. Together, they have 6-7 smaller pups that range between 1 and 4 ft tall growing up against them. Today, I raked back the mulch around them to fertilize (for the first time) and discovered a plethora of pups sprouting along the roots of both of the largest plants. What do you recommend I do at this point? It looks like we're on the way to having a banana forest and that's not what we want. I'd love to get fruit, although that's not our top priority (pretty poolside landscape comes first). It would be nice to transplant a few of these bananas, but not all of them. Should we cut some down to allow the largest ones to get more nutrients? Other advice? Thanks for reading all the way through this post and for any suggestions!

Dalmatiansoap

I would pot few as a backup plants since ur in 8b zone. U can trim the clump for the visuals but larger it is it will easier fruit.

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crazy banana

If you do not want a banana forest, just keep the largest two or three and remove the others. You can transplant the others, give them away etc., but please only call them IceCream after they have fruited for you and they turned out to be IceCream and not something else (a lot of plants sold as IceCream in the US are mis-labeled and turn out to be Namwah).

katykat

Argh....just read some of the threads re Blue Java vs Nam Wa. I would not doubt my source would sell me one thing and call it another--she has done that a couple of times. I have a Cavendish that looks very similar but seems to have a lot more pink on the pseudostem or whatever it's called.