maxandkaia

Here's my plant:



I'm in San Diego, CA and the plant gets partial to full sun.

It fruited about 3-4 months ago (December I think). The fruit never got very big. The year before that, they did, and we ate them These aren't looking big enough to eat and have not grown at all in over a month. The next biggest pup is almost as big as the mother, maybe bigger. So, my questions are:

1) will that second trunk fruit if I don't harvest the current hands?
2) if I cut the current fruit off, will the second trunk fruit faster?
3) what should I do to get bigger fruit?
4) is there anything I can do to control the timing of the fruiting?

Thanks!

Gabe15

1) will that second trunk fruit if I don't harvest the current hands?

The second plant will still fruit regardless of the what the first one is doing.

2) if I cut the current fruit off, will the second trunk fruit faster?

No, it will grow at the same pace and fruit at the same time as it would otherwise.

3) what should I do to get bigger fruit?

Fertilize.

4) is there anything I can do to control the timing of the fruiting?

Bananas fruit when they are mature, you cannot control it directly. You can however remove suckers from the mat when they are young so that there are never any two suckers that are the same size. In this way, every shoot will be at a different stage of growth, and each will then fruit at a different time.

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

pitangadiego

Couldn't have said it better.

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Encanto Farms Nursery
http://encantofarms.com
We Be Bananas
http://webebananas.com

chasbear

Gabe, as always, great advice. The only thing I wanted to add was that I was curious about the age of the current bunch of fruit and could it be removed yet and ripened off of the plant; this is something that we always keep track of on our plants. According to the the climate and elevation where I am and the variety that we grow, at a specific number of weeks from the time that all of the hands have emerged and the flower is removed, the fruit is fully mature and we remove the pstem and bunch even though still green for the ripening process. This in effect makes more nutrients available to the other stems.

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