PR-Giants

I have only been a member here for a short time, but have spent much time searching this site for info.

I have found the Wiki to be very Weaki and feel there must be a better way to access info.

I think having a thread dedicated to each cultivar

with members being allotted one post/section for photos and remarks, would be very helpful.

by limiting it to one post per member, the thread would be more of a database w/out the BS found in some of the longer threads.

the thread should be arranged alphabetically or in a searchable format so to easily find the info & photos of the member you are searching.


If you like this idea mark this post with a Thanks.

If you don't like this idea mark the next post with a Thanks.


Please feel free to improve this idea.

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15,000+ Varieties

Dalmatiansoap

That would bring to many subjective visions and make to big mess. Just imagine thread about "fake Ice Cream" or Misi Luki.
On the other side I do agree that Wiki might be improved somehow.
My 2 cents.

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G.W.

agree the wiki is weak

I'd like to link to some better threads in my sig like "Muriate or Sulphate of Potash"
that way it would be sure to come up

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winter winners, jackfruit, carambola, hua moa, d namwah, hak ip lychee with pink leaves 2 days before a cold snap eeeek!

Winter losers, kohala longan, misi luki, 80% jackfruit seedling loss

first bloomers, HUA MOA, DC, D NAMWAH, FHIA 17, KANADARIAN, RAJA PURI, M D NAMWAH

best bunch FHIA 17 , undisclosed

WORST BUNCH hua moa, 2 fingers

brod

I agree the Wiki is a bit thin on the ground. But any improvements need to be done by people who know what what is what regarding bananas

oakshadows

Much agreement there, althought there is a large number of members, there seems to be little interest in improving this area. Realizing of course that many members have a lot info but it sometimes takes a lot of their time. Maybe this thread along with some support from us will get more info into Wiki.

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"What this country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds."

jjjankovsky

? Perhaps as a newcomer, you don't need to re-organize the forum yet...perhaps you might wait for 2-3 years, learn it's culture, and be a participant with a viable voice.

then, work your way toward being the moderator.

good luck and welcome.

Jose263

I was a member for quite awhile before discovering WiKi and it is a marvelous resource for me:.. Please don't get rid of it .. i read it often.
I'd like to see some of the blanks filled on many of the varieties and maybe more info. like size of the fruit, ripening time, etc.

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Growing: Orinoco, Rajapuri, Dwarf Cav, SDC, TT, Dwarf Red, Dwarf Namwah, Tall Namwah (aka Ice Cream), Dwarf Brazilian, Veinte Cohol, California Gold, Double Mohai, NOT-Goldfinger, Gran Nain, Velutina

jjjankovsky

Jose, where is this Wiki?

caliboy1994

Limiting posts to 1 per member per thread completely defeats the purpose of a forum. Forums are meant for conversations between members of the forums. With only one post per member, that would be impossible. What really needs to be done is the adding of more information to the wiki.

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PR-Giants

Thanks Ante
I don't know think it would get too messy and even if it did get messy and huge, the beauty of a searchable thread is that you only need to read info from members of your choosing. It would be like a personalized homepage for a member growing that cultivar and seeing that it can't be edited or deleted by others, I think we would get some high quality posts with great photos.
Knowing human nature after the first quality post, there will probaly be many more to follow.
I don't know how to improve the Wiki, but many people take pride in things that are personalized.
Maybe starting with a few popular cultivars first and see how it goes would work best.

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PR-Giants

Maybe the way I write is difficult to understand, the THREAD I am proposing would be for a database not for a discussion, where each member was allotted one section. The member can write something profound or something idiotic, their choice.

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15,000+ Varieties

Jose263

Top of the page - see pdf attached

Attached Images

Untitled-1.pdf (53.2 KB, 6 views)

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Growing: Orinoco, Rajapuri, Dwarf Cav, SDC, TT, Dwarf Red, Dwarf Namwah, Tall Namwah (aka Ice Cream), Dwarf Brazilian, Veinte Cohol, California Gold, Double Mohai, NOT-Goldfinger, Gran Nain, Velutina

Yug

You remind me of many of the novice orchid growers I've run across - they want exact guidance on how to grow each and every type of orchid, and if the information they get doesn't virtually guarantee their success, they blame it on the advice. The problem is that the guidelines are just that - "guidelines" - and not an exact solution. Soil quality, water quality & quantity, local weather, growing zone you are in, type of fertilizer, etc. all have an effect on things, but within each growing area there are what are referred to as micro-climates that have varying degrees of effects on a plant. My neighbor may do well with the general guidelines, however I live on the end of a building, and as a result have a breeze whipping through the back. This dries up my plants, and I have to use a potting mix that will retain more moisture than my neighbor does. Also, he can use slat-baskets for many of his, but I must use pots since their sides are solid and will not dry out as easily. I've seen plants of another friend when he couldn't understand why the ones at the side of his house all die, but the ones in the back survive. Both get virtually the same amount of sun exposure. The mystery was solved when I noticed that in back of the house there was a slight breeze providing some air movement, yet on the side where the plants die all the time there was no air movement at all, and those plants were just baking in the heat until they died. A slight amount of air movement would have made all the difference. See? Micro-climates can exist with very little distance between them. An exact description of growing techniques will not guarantee success; you must observe your plants and adjust the general guidelines accordingly. Know your growing area, and what your specific conditions are, and you will be in a much better position to grow/bloom/fruit a plant. There is no substitute for learning what adjustments you need - this gives you experience, and improves your results. Also, don't ever be too rigid in your technique - a little experimentation may give dramatic results, both good or bad, which is why you must observe closely and adjust quickly if you've noticed a negative impact.

PR-Giants

Thanks for you input Guy,

It was not my intention to appear as a novice banana grower or even as an expert grower. I mainly grow one cultivar and have little or no experience with the others. After being here a few months and noticing that much of the data is scattered deep in some threads, I felt a thread centralizing some data on popular cultivars would be helpful to many members. The Wiki has not been helpful for me because when I am reading something and come upon an obvious error I stop reading and disregard the entire page. A member that does not notice the error will believe it to be accurate. What seems to be missing in the Wiki is "pride", if an experienced member had the opportunity to make a small display of photos and remarks in an easily accessible database, I think their pride would help in creating some amazing and informative posts. The fact that some yahoo can't come along and edit their work is an added benefit. By giving even the most inexperienced members the same opportunity, they might try to emulate what they see. This in turn will improve their knowledge and this site as a whole, it's a "win - win".

As for me

I live on a large windy rock and for the most part without any soil, even my fruit trees grow with a profound curve due to the wind. I was forced to do hundreds of experiments to be successful at growing bananas. I firmly believe there are many different ways to grow bananas but maximizing yield is what I strive for. Before coming to this site, I was unaware that some of my growing techniques that I have been using for the past 15 years were not supposed to be possible. Without your post here I would not even have known that orchids did not like air movement. I have thousands of orchids and don't consider myself an orchid grower, I don't even consider myself a plant person. I have never watered or fertilized my orchids, but they seem to do fine even though their enviroment is very windy.


This is the view from my ROCK
[IMG][/IMG]


This is an actual sample of the soil that I start with to grow bananas. I also use it to make concrete, it's a multi purpose soil.
[IMG][/IMG]


This is an orchid that has been growing for more than 10 years w/out me ever having to water or fertilize. I do occasionally subdivide them with a machete.
[IMG][/IMG]

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15,000+ Varieties

Yug

Looks like a Cattleya bowringiana, or possibly a hybrid of it. Great specimen plant!

I have to correct one thing, I wasn't saying orchids don't like air movement - they do, especially in high heat areas, in my case however the air movement is too much - if I'm not really careful about the container and the potting mix, the air strips more moisture from the leaves than can be replaced by the roots. When this happens the plant will die a long and slow death from dehydration. Lack of water won't kill most orchids for quite a while - the reason their stems swell up (on most types) is to provide a reservoir against the dry period which may be from 3 to 7 months in some places. Fast air movement, however will strip moisture from blooms, and new growth quite quickly. That is why in windy areas, the growing period, and the blooming period is quite brief. I have one cattleya species that will bloom only once a year, and it generally lasts only 10 days. I can only assume that during its life cycle in its natural habitat, most of the rest of the year is rather harsh so if it is to survive, it has to do its breeding job very quickly.

Anyway, back to bananas. I've seen some info in the 'Wiki' that I know is false, but I have only bothered to make any alterations/additions to types that I have personal knowledge of. I'm still pretty much a novice, though, so I make changes sparingly. For example, there are descriptions of the Ele Ele that say it is the stoutest banana grown. Gabe has far more experience than I with this type, and he says it is no thinner or stouter than other bananas he'd grown, and that that description was probably a cut/paste job from another site, and it has been probably been spread around, not by being written from personal experience, but by cut/paste from other sites. Eventually the story becomes wide-spread, but the original poster is lost in the ether so you have no way of knowing if what was written was true, or exactly what was meant by Ele Ele being 'stout'. May have been fruit, p-stem, petiole, or something else. Or it could have been wrong. Most noob's won't change what is written down already.

robguz24

It's an interesting idea and I have wondered why they don't have a thread for each banana type. Then when I think about it more they would just run on and on and eventually be very time consuming to get the most relevant info from. I feel like I have done ok when I just use the search. I also think with SO many types of bananas and multiple names for most of them, it becomes unwieldy. I'm on this site AVSforums too and they have threads for so many electronics. And they end up being hundreds of pages for things like a blu-ray player that is only made for a year. I agree the Wiki is limited too, and like Yug I've seen errors, or things that can't possibly be addressed simply because variation in climate, etc that he mentions.

Like just thinking about Tall Reds where I live with no soil, regular feeding and 80" of rain I've had trouble getting fruit. A 10 minute drive away rain is nearly double, there's some soil, and my friend's mat of them are huge and gorgeous and he doesn't even feed them. So how do you summarize in a Wiki? And if you have a thread it would be endless if there can be that big a difference. 10 minutes the other direction would be 20 year old lava with zero wind protection in any direction so there would be that whole set of differences.

My solution when I learn about a new banana or buy one is to search forums, look at the Wiki, and google it and from that I get a good sampling which I then usually just settle on that I should just plant it and see! The encanto farms side is also a go to place for me where there is a compilation of varying statements and pictures. It's a great complement to bananas.org

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jmoore

How about, if you know a little bit about a certain banana, put it in the wiki. That's what the wiki is for. It would save a lot of the same type of questions on the same banana. But I guess the question is time.

Nicolas Naranja

I use the USDA website for a lot of the guidance on fruit fruit dimensions and time from flower to harvest. However, it would be nice to have some specific information from different locations. Also it would be helpful to have pictures of the juvenile plant, the mature plant, the petioles, the male flower, and the bunch. You could then get some harvest information like number of hands, number of fruit, bunch weight, finger length, finger diameter, time from flower to harvest and plant height at flowering. Next to those parameters you could put the location, because data is going to be different from Puerto Rico to Fort Pierce to San Diego.

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G.W.

I do have an idea for a thread that would condense searching

I have seen threads elsewhere in which the first/main/only post was edited to reflect new links to other threads and resources, once it had been approved

sort of a link index to the forum

I"ll go look at another forum I saw which was UBER helpful and see how they had it formatted

I think members used the thread to reply with their suggested links and if it was good then the top post was edited to include it.
This thread was a sticky in whatever section it applied to.

(Oh BTW it got named after the guy who thought of it )
example

Banana Newbies LINK-O-RAMA

WIKI
All articles - Bananas Wiki

Bananas and COLD
Hardiness (plants) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Link
Link
Link
Link

Bananas and water
Link
Link
Link

Bananas and etc
link
link
Now we insert alphabetically ordered links to all the newb Q/A and thereby reduce thread volume

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winter winners, jackfruit, carambola, hua moa, d namwah, hak ip lychee with pink leaves 2 days before a cold snap eeeek!

Winter losers, kohala longan, misi luki, 80% jackfruit seedling loss

first bloomers, HUA MOA, DC, D NAMWAH, FHIA 17, KANADARIAN, RAJA PURI, M D NAMWAH

best bunch FHIA 17 , undisclosed

WORST BUNCH hua moa, 2 fingers

Jose263

Great discussion - I think GW has an idea worthy of pursuit -

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Growing: Orinoco, Rajapuri, Dwarf Cav, SDC, TT, Dwarf Red, Dwarf Namwah, Tall Namwah (aka Ice Cream), Dwarf Brazilian, Veinte Cohol, California Gold, Double Mohai, NOT-Goldfinger, Gran Nain, Velutina