Casper Jansen

I am frightfully awaiting the rainy season here in Mali because rain is always preceded by exteme heavy winds. So I am trying to prepare for this. Many of the lager b.trees now have some sort of support, al fruiting trees have extra support underneath the fruit stem. But afraid its not enough and on researching the Internet with my shaky connection I found the idea of pruning the leaves when heavy wind is expected. As long as you leave 5 leaves, the b.tree wil not be damaged or hampered in its growth or fruit development, or so it states.
I assume less leaves means less wind pulling and less chance of the tree breaking or falling over.
Does anyone have any thoughts or experience on/with this practice. Or any other smart ideas?
Thanks in advance, with warm greetings from beautiful Mali.

raygrogan

I don't know how strong your winds are in Mali, and I don't have much experience trimming leaves to reduce fall downs. But this after our last big wind I did try one thing new, propping plants up to let fruit ripen. (This was inspired by bananas.org - people seem to have good luck with bunches that come late in the season on the mainland, etc.)

I tie up most of my tall bananas as soon as they go into fruit. This works very well, and prevents 90% of fall downs so you are on the right track there. But just before this last Christmas I had been gone for many months, and there were lots of bunches of fruit that had not been tied up when a big wind came. Some were laying on the ground and I harvested what I could and chopped up the rest. 6 were fallen over, but at a 45 degree angle, laying on other plants. These were the new thing - I made bamboo X-braces for each and supported each about as it was. Very easy. And dumped a bucket of good dirt around the base, and watered well. One did not do much and ripened early, barely edible. 4 of the 6 continued to grow, more or less normally, and ripened normally. The last one is still green now almost 6 months later, nice and fat, should ripen any day now.

The next wind storm I am going to try propping up the ones that are flat out down on the ground to see what happens.