Quote:
Originally Posted by modenacart
Is using the pseudostem height a good judge of when your plant is going to fruit or is there a better way?
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Some use the number of leaves and I found this inaccurate
Some use age, but this depends on size of plant when you put them in the ground.
Some use height but this could not be generalized across various locations and your crop management style.
If there's data available and compiled for each cultivar, I think the best determinant would be the number of warm hours, like 55-95 deg F that the plant has undergone. The same way like the Utah model is used for chilling hours on temperate fruits, but instead we are using warming hours. The reason why I chose 55 deg F is that bananas start to grow actively (phenological aging) at this temperature, and beyond 95 deg F, it also stops growing due to stress. However, I haven't come across any scientific literature doing this correlation analysis to build such models while we have a lot of studies for temperate crops in the chilling hours.
In the absence of such best theoretical methods, the height works very well once you get your clump going. But first, you have to take note the height the specific cultivar will start to bloom in your yard. The height when the plant is supposed to bloom varies from yard to yard and so if you generalize across various regions, it is a very poor indicator. But once you get the feel of it in your yard, you can "sense" when your plant is about to bloom judging by its size and your past experience with them.