Quote:
Originally Posted by Botanical_Bryce
What does self fertile mean? Does that mean it produces seed?
|
Self-fertility generally means a plant is able to provide it's own pollen to itself for fruit development, it is capable of in-breeding. Some cultivars of some crops are self-fertile and require no other plants of different cultivars around, whereas some have mechanisms to prevent in-breeding and promote or require out-crossing with other cultivars to set fruit.
"Self-fertility" is a term not generally used in bananas as it is somewhat meaningless and irrelevant in most cases (though very meaningful and relevant to some other common fruits). For edible bananas, fertility is of no factor because they are parthenocarpic, which could be mistaken as self-fertility, but really is it complete fertility avoidance and the fruit is stimulated to develop by other means (genetically controlled vegetative parthenocarpy), making the question of whether or not a particular edible cultivar can self-pollinate or requires an alternative source of pollen to set seed irrelevant to fruit production.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gnappi
No, it means that the flowers are "perfect" having both male and female parts of the flower, and do not need another tree of the same type nearby to pollinate it to get fruit.
|
Some wild bananas do indeed have perfect basal flowers and regularly self pollinate, and are indeed self-fertile, but even those that only have female basal flowers are almost always still self-fertile as they are normally capable of using pollen from the male flowers on a different bunch from the same mat. I have not heard of any banana which is not able to use it's own pollen if it is available, the issue is generally that in early growth of the mat there is generally no overlap in time between the female and male flowers, which is the banana's way of promoting (but short of preventing) out-crossing by temporal separation of the male and female flowers in the wild.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gnappi
I am wondering about this issue. I have two other types of nannas and since the literature with it says they can be cross pollinated, that suggests that if I were to hand pollinate them I could use the seeds from the variegated tree to attempt some hybridization. That may make the resulting fruit either larger or better tasting?
|
It totally depends on what the exact varieties are, as not all bananas are able to cross with one another. It's possible to make these types of crosses and generate new edible cultivars, but it can be a long and complicated process.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gnappi
I wonder if this has been tried with the edible type Gabe15 mentioned?
|
I have not attempted any crosses with the edible red-variegated banana we are talking about, it may or may not have the ability to set seed with certain male parents, the male flowers do have a small amount of pollen which may be fertile and yield seed if used on a fertile female parent.