Gabe15

This counting leaves business has come up several times. It is not a reliable way to predict blooming, just saying that a banana will fruit after so many leaves. However, if you were to track the number of leaves a particular variety makes before flowering in your specific growing conditions, and you were able to repeat this many times you would probably be able to come up with a good average of how many leaves a specific variety must make before flowering. If you were able to go this far, then you would just as easily be able to say how much active growing time is required (which is just a different unit for the same measurement as counting leaves). There are stats on how many leaves a plant has made before flowering, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it requires that amount to flower, or that after reaching that number it will begin to flower. A leaf count may be handy if you have a lot of starts and stops in your growing cycles, but I haven't seen any research into this area. Since there is so much diversity between varieties and so much diversity in growing conditions, it is very unreliable to say that "bananas in general" will flower after however many leaves.

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