saturn

For the past two winters, I have had a lot of mortalities in my potted, house-grown bananas. And despite a warm winter, I lost a few basjoos and a palm outside. This has been a big disappointment, obviously. Even worse, the plants I found for sale locally last year did not excite me and this year I have seen no bananas at the garden shops! They have been slow in getting in the elephant ears, too, so my yard is looking WAY less tropical than it should. Well, at least my Windmill Palm is getting big and looks so fabulous every day of the year

I'd actually like to figure out why my naners are dying, but there seems to be no evident cause. The only things I can figure are that it is too cold in my house or the soil mix is bad (they are all in different soils, depending on what I have at the moment). Some wither away, some rot above the soil...and now that I think about it, maybe it's just the thrips. I think I lost a LOT of plants to them this year, although each plant didn't seem to have a lot of the insects on it. Can thrips be that evil? I think so...

So it's June, and I'm looking around my yard and there is a serious lack of bananas! I do have a mat of basjoo and Musella lasiocarpa, one zebrina in a pot, and a tiny SDC clinging on to life. My biggest corm, a gran naine that is about 3 years old, made it to April and promptly died back. Fortunately, it is just putting out some pups now, but it will be another month before they are anything to look at I am so desperate I bought a canna, because it looks like a Red Abyssinian. Hopefully the canna will do better than the Abyssinian I lost a few years back.

Hope everybody else is having better luck with their naners and tropicals.

saturn

Carolina

Where do you live in NC? I'm in Edenton if you can get by here. I lost alot myself but I do have a gran nain pup, a couple of Orinoco and plenty (of course) DC.