PR-Giants

Looking for some propagation advice.

This young highly variegated sword pup rhizome is much larger than I prefer to work with and is the result of not separating it 2 weeks ago. It was left as the dominant ratoon pup after the apical meristem of it's mother was removed.

Most of the leaf sheath remnants were removed after the photo was taken.

The pup's apical meristem has the most value here so I'd like to quickly move it and then remove it for repotting. Then I'll focus on propagating the remaining rhizome.

I'm looking for a technique that is going to be substantially quicker than Vertical Propagation, i.e. moving the apical meristem directly upwards.

Any ideas?

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Charles G.

Would planting it side ways or even upside down work?

PR-Giants

The technique you're describing would absolutely work and it will work great.

I call all the techniques of adjusting the angle of the apical meristem the cincinnana.

This is out of respect to the great banana mind from lower Ohio. This member often posted a photo of potted banana plants that blew over during a high wind event and after some time the pseudostems bent upwards as the apical meristems adjusted

Planting it upside down,

aka changing the angle 180 degrees will affect the apical meristem but because most of the auxiliary meristems under the existing leaf sheats are also in the same area this technique will have a negative impact for propagating most of those auxiliary meristems.

Planting it side ways

this would not be ideal for this rhizome because it's very large and would have a high lateral resistance working against the apical meristem. This angle would work great for small plants/rhizomes as shown in cincinnana's photo because of the lower lateral resistance.

The quickest way to understand lateral resistance is by completely removing it. If a rhizome was perfectly split through the apical meristem and the two halves were planted flat side up, both pieces of the apical meristem would perform a 90 degree turn upwards.

In these examples if 180 is bad and 90 is better, then finding the optimal angle becomes easier. And this is the most important part, that angle can easily be adjusted throughout the process as lateral resistance changes.

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Jeff zone 8 N.C.

After cutting the trunk down and then looking down from the top of the corm, would cutting the meristem with a cross (quartering the meristem) but keeping the corm mainly intact or slicing all the way through the corm and placing the pieces on their side give a better chance of quicker propagation? Also if not worried about time restraints would this method have any negative drawbacks?

Charles G.

So did you use the cincinnana method or the banana split?

PR-Giants

I wouldn't do either of those techniques for propagation purposes mainly because it's quicker, easier and more effective to use a 2 by 4 or a hammer.

If you look at some propagation manuals on this forum you'll see that all these techniques that damage the apical meristem are somewhat similar. That's basically how tissue culture labs divide the meristems, obviously absent the sterile conditions they use.

https://www.bananas.org/f260/mutilat...tml#post356840

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PR-Giants

I don't normally split bananas but it's good to do it at least once to have firsthand experience of how the apical meristem reacts.

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PR-Giants

Yes, It's currently at a 60 degree angle which will eventually be lowered to zero in phases as the meristem moves and lateral resistance is reduced.

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Charles G.

Do you have it in a bucket or something to easily adjust angle? Would this exercise work well on highly rare varieties that don't produce many pups and hasn't been tissue cultured?

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I have it in a very large ceramic pot which will make adjusting the angle simple without having to change the angle of the pot.

It's difficult to be specific because there are many different techniques each having many variations and that's because there are many banana varieties that pup differently or have very different pup formations and locations.

This is a variegated Tani that will produce single auxiliary meristems where the two edges of the lower leaf sheaths intersect.

The main reason to move the apical meristem is for valuable plants where you don't want to kill the main plant just to remove apical dominance.

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