SJWYUMA

The 1000 mats per ha seems about right, which is why I noted that with 5 acs you are looking at a couple thousand mats...

Not baging the fruit? Why is that? Bagging provides 2 primary advantages--first, it brings the fruit on quicker, perhaps a week or so... which over the course of lots of mats means lots more fruit per ac per year.

Second is the quality... you will get MUCH nicer, cleaner fruit with bags. The bags protect them from wind, rain, dust, bugs, sunburn. Your cullage will be much less, you will have a much higher % of marketable fruit. When you see in the literature that up to 40% of the fruit in places is culled, you can bet that they were un-bagged.

In the intensive banana producing areas of the world, if a bag comes off, they just cut down he plant and wait for the follower as it is not worth harvesting.

I highly recommend that you experiment with bags. In Hawaii, they use both a fine mesh reusable bag, and also the poly bag with small air holes punched in it common in Central America. Medjool date growers also use the fine mesh bags.

And that is where the color coding comes in. You may know this, but for those who don't, growers use flagging ribbon at bagging to note which week the raceme was bagged. Most have a 10 color rotation, some use multiple colors tied together if they can't find enough colors (red over blue, blue over red, solid red, solid blue makes 4 weeks with 2 colors). Harvest is then simplified by only having to look for the 25 or so racemes with that color each week of harvest in each acre.

Don't fool yourself to think that specialty bananas are less intensive!!! Proper Husbandry is critical for success in all flavors... the weeds have to be kept down, the daughter plants selected, dead leaves pruned, the flowers cut off and the non productive hands removed from each raceme, fertilizer applied for max production, pest scouting. Holes in the plantings need to be re-populated, pathways to get the fruit out of the field maintained... boggy areas filled so you can get though them when it is wet, drainage ditches cut so the low areas don't drown. All of these things will be issues at some point, and many more I have not mentioned. And this does not even begin to cover the upkeep on packing needs... tank maintainence, getting the alum ratios right, clean cutting areas, box storage, etc etc etc ad nauseum...

If you are doing it organic, then even more so as Organic production takes much better managment, and you must be way in front of the curve on pest management--which includes weeds as well as bugs and diseases.

as for the mosquitos... part of the package!!

Again, best wishes!
Steve West