rbrgs

I posted this list of bananas I grow in the gardening section of another forum; it's as good an intro as any, and I already typed it once....

Cavendish (also called Chinese and dwarf, if you've got a banana in a pot, it's probably this one)

Williams (current commercial banana; spontaneous sport of Cavendish)

There's a new strain of an old disease (fusarium; called Panama Wilt in bananas) that's impacting these two varieties. Hawaii has an agricultural quarantine...which sometimes even works. We'll see.

Golden Beauty (old commercial variety; good tasting and high yielding, but complicated to pick because they're 25' tall and snap rather than bending)

Golden Aromatic (another old variety; fruit is long and thin, very sweet and strong)

Ice Cream (a blue sport of a common cooking banana; tastes like marshmallows when ripe, but really hard to peel)

Lady Finger (my favorite; tall and exotic, with red leaf ribs and extra color in the trunk, the bananas are small and tightly packed)

Apple (another old, tall variety that's really good for fresh eating, but too fragile to move once they turn yellow)

Dwarf Apple (a cross between William and Apple; bred for marketing, highly responsive to fertilizer)

Thai (very different; ripe fruit is firm and almost crisp)

Cuban Red (slow growing, strong tasting, the fruit and the plant have lots of red pigment everywhere but the tops of the leaves; usually eaten cooked)

Cuban Yellow (the same plant, without the red--sports that appear on red clumps)

Silk Fig (another fresh eating variety with a thin skin and an aversion to chemical fertilizers)

Variegated (a weird sport that's more ornamental than useful; there are white streaks in the leaves where the chlorophyll is missing)

and 3 kinds of cooking bananas whose names I don't know.

I'm at about 1900' on the wet side, and my current project is hand clearing waiawi to plant coffee (and more bananas) as an understory in the Ohia forest.