My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

:08:

P-stem is currently about 3' (it was around 4' when I trimmed it back last month).

4/27


4/28




4/29




I received the plant in the mail on 1/28/2012 as a 2" tall tissue culture plant from Wellspring Gardens. Here's a pic of it then (from left to right: Gran Nain, Dwarf Red, Dwarf Cavendish, and Truly Tiny)--


Here it is right after I planted it 15 months ago:



Here it is in October after a good summer of growth (very center of 1st pic just right of the papaya; hiding in the background just left of the Dwarf Red in the 2nd pic):




Unfortunately all of the bananas stopped growing at that point. By January the leaves were all half yellow and by March they were all dead/yellow. I recently cut all the pstems back till I found green, and they all began to leaf back out. The DC only managed to push out 4 leaves before sending up the flag, though, so I may end up trimming off half the hands in order to get the remaining hands to fill out well.

If the bananas hadn't all stopped growing in October, I think the plant would have flowered sometime in November with a dozen or so big green leaves to power it. The bananas grew fine through their first winter (when they first arrived as tiny tc's), but I nearly killed them in October when I had to shut down the system's water circulation for a couple of days. I had some supplemental aeration going, but it wasn't good enough and the plants basically almost all drowned (all growth immediately stopped and didn't resume till I cut them back about a month ago). Furthermore, whereas during the 1st winter I bounced a lot of extra sunlight into the greenhouse (keeping it both warmer and brighter), this past winter the plants had to make-do with less light and heat because I built a structure just south of it (only place I could put it) last summer that unfortunately blocks a lot of that 'extra' light.

But oh well. Far from ideal, but I'm not complaining. Down the road I'll pamper them better; for now I'm happy to have my first flag leaf.
:woohoonaner:

Re: My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

Looks like you have some papayas. What kind of papayas do you have?

Re: My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

Red Lady

Re: My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

You will have a treat. Nothing better than home grown papayas! Good luck with your banana.

Re: My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

Very nice! Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're growing your bananas hydroponically? Can you please describe your setup?

Re: My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

Very cool you're tropical fruits in Kansas! Keep the pics coming!

Re: My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

You're close: I'm growing them aquaponically, which is like hydroponics except that rather than adding nutrients directly to the water, I feed the fish.

My system has a 1,700 gallon fish tank and a 165 square foot gravel grow bed. Water from the fish tank carries fish waste through a set of channels in the grow bed, where it is eaten by worms, broken down by bacteria, and consumed by the plants. The resulting clean water is then pumped back into the fish tank in a constantly repeating cycle.

The bananas are planted directly in the gravel grow bed. If you follow the path past the bananas...


...you'll arrive at the tilapia tank. Here's a pic of them gathering near the surface right before feeding time:


Here are a couple that I netted out and set on a 5-gallon bucket for size reference:



Tilapia are delicious when raised in a clean environment. My favorite way to prepare them is to filet them, soak the filets in saltwater over night, then rinse thoroughly and either pop them in the Frydaddy (coated in onion ring mix)...



...or bake them with butter, basil, garlic powder, lemon salt, and black pepper. Tilapia have a strip of bony red meat along the middle of their filets, so when I'm fileting I prefer to cut that out, yielding half-filets that look like what you see below.

Re: My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

Thanks for the insight! I'm very familliar with aquaponics and have been planning to setup a CHIFT/PIST system here soon raising Talapia, too. But, I'm jealous of your 1,700 gallon tank! I was planning on something like 150-250 gallons due to space limitations. Great setup and delicious-looking fish!

Re: My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

Yeah that whole system of the tank, the fish, and the bananas is incredible; wonderful for the environment.

Re: My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

I really like this! I have been wanting to try out an aquaponic setup for some time. I was considering using an above ground pool as my fish tank and having LOTS of fish. How fast do your fish reproduce? It looks as if your graven bed in on the ground the fish tank above the bed. How do you get the water to return back from the ground gravel to the fish tank?

Re: My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

Can we get a Banana update too? :^)

Re: My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

Thanks for the nice words :)

The fish reproduce fast and will overpopulate in short order if you don't account for it. The most natural and convenient way to control it is probably to stock some largemouth bass or other apex predator in there to balance the system. That's what I did. It works well, and you get some big game fish out of the deal. Doesn't require many, maybe 1 for every few hundred tilapia.

You have a good eye noting the relative heights, and how they are inverted from what is generally seen. The original plan was to have the gravel grow bed a bit higher than the fish tank, but I just ran out of energy and motivation digging the hole for the fish tank (it was the middle of winter, the ground was frozen, and I was chipping at it with a pickaxe). So I inverted the design and added a deep 'hole' in the grow bed that is close to 3' deep. The water flows through the grow bed to that hole, at which point I use an airlift to pump the water out of there up to the fish tank, where it then overflows back to the gravel. I don't recommend the inverted method, and wish I would have just put in the extra time and work to fulfill the original design.

I have experimented with above ground pools. I'm currently using 5 (a 600 gal, two 1,700 gal, and two 4,000 gal). I don't really like them, but that's skewed by the particular experiment I was running (exploring the limits of greenwater aquaculture), which was disappointing. If you hook up sufficient grow beds to them, they should work fine (once 'broken in' and cycled for a while), with the added plus that it's especially easy to set up those grow beds at waist level in that type of a system. So a user-friendly system is definitely possible via that route. I'll probably re-purpose my pools for growing that way next year.

Re: My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

Here's the DC bunch as of today (click to enlarge):

How close to ready do you suppose this bunch is? 80% of the way there?

Re: My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

How far along is it?

Re: My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

It's been around 3 months since the last hand of female fingers was exposed. (Is that the proper start time, or is it from when the tip of the bud is first exposed?)

Here it was on May 13th








and July 19th

Re: My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

Your conditions are obviously different than mine but here all my bunches take about 6 months from bloom (first hand exposed) to ripe. Sometimes a little longer depending the weather. If your conditions are more like the tropics they could be 80%.

Re: My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

The fingers are filled in well. I would wait 3 more weeks and cut the bunch down. Ripen in the house to slow down the ripening. Hang up the first hand in the greenhouse to speed up tasting them.

Don't wait for yellow skins - not necessary.

Good job with the G H.

Re: My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

That bunch is very close to ready. It appears more than 90% filled in. Congratulations on your banana bunch!

I have NEVER tasted home grown bananas. My first bunch still has at least another 5 weeks before it is ready for harvest.

Re: My 1st Flag Leaf - Dwarf Cavendish
 

If you are going to be in the Port St Lucie area this week you can stop by and taste some Pisang Klotek. Still have some green fingers left that will be yellow soon. And take some avocados too. Have lots.