Seperating pups & then choping leaves
 

Is it best to chop pups leaves off instead of leaving them on? When you are seperating them.

One thing that I have noticed is that when I get a banana plant in the mail that leaves are chopped off (for easier shipping) it will be harder to kill and seems to have no stress. When I seperate a pup or get one in the mail with leaves it seems to go through more stress and seems to die more easier.

I know that when you cut pups leaves off the roots will grow more, and then they will pop a leaf that seems to had no stress... Or did I just answer myself?



.

Re: Seperating pups & then choping leaves
 

Leave the leaves on. They help the plant recover, and it will naturally shed the ones it cannot support.

Re: Seperating pups & then choping leaves
 

When I separate pups I remove all the but the last leaf. Making it easier for the plant to grow roots without having to sustain many leafs.

Re: Seperating pups & then choping leaves
 

Seems it depends on how many roots it has when it's separated. A few roots cut the leaves lots of roots better to keep the leaves

Re: Seperating pups & then choping leaves
 

In most cases, if we are talking a pup, we are talking about a sword sucker, which generally has few, if any, true leaves, even at 36" tall for tall varieties, so it is somewhat of a moot point. If it is a dwarf variety, then you are probably removing a shorter sucker, but it will still have few true leaves. If it is a water sucker, then it will have a lot of leaves, and probably not as many roots.

If we are talking a fully leafed out plant, then we are probably not talking a pup.

Re: Seperating pups & then choping leaves
 

In my experience here, when I remove a good following-on sucker (i.e. not a water sucker) that has some fully developed leaves [IMG][/IMG](i.e. not a young sword sucker), which is often the case with our variety here, then when this is re-planted it is suffering from a loss of nutrition and water due to disruption of the root system. Since I cannot provide shade for the hundreds of plantings that we might be doing here, I've found that its best to cut half of every leaf off, including the "cigar," if it has one. This saves the plant from loosing water through the leaves while the sun is out. To help the plants with their nutrition needs, I spray a good foliar application on all remaining leaves and pseudostems once a week. I prefer to make my own chicken manure tea or pig manure tea, if you're familiar with this sort of thing, but I've also used commercial products available here. I add a fungicide for the Sigatoka protection needed here. So this takes care of the lack of nutrition from being wrenched from the ground; I'm not sure that any of the roots left after pulling up a sucker are immediately able to help the corm, but need to re-grow the tiny mini-root hairs to function properly. My experience has been that with this method the plants start re-growing much quicker than if they'd been cut down all the way to the corm, and there's nothing I like better than giving my plants a jump on getting re-growing.