Go Bananas!

Photograph by Jeremy Franchi

The time has come to introduce bananas to my blog. My seeds will be here Friday and the next round of tropical crop will commence. Hopefully the 48 cacao seeds that are sucking up space in my house will have made a little room by then.

With that said, I'm very excited to grow myself this large herb (nope it's not a tree!). Bananas, like their relative the the bird-of-paradise plant (S. reginae),  are slow to germinate. They can take up to 7+ months! Once they've sprouted, however, they grow rapidly and can reach full size in just a few weeks. The variety I bought is a dwarf of the Musa acuminata variety, which is pretty much a necessity considering some varieties can reach 25 feet in height! We can't have that in my little apartment.

Wild banana, photographed by Hidenobu Funakoshi

The bananas you buy at the grocery store are actually a parthenocarpic variety from the wild species Musa acuminata and/or Musa balbisiana. This just means there's no seeds in the kind you buy at the store. As you can see from the photo to the right, wild bananas are chock full of seeds and wouldn't be quite as smooth to eat.

The banana's anatomy consists of an underground corm and a "trunk," technically a pseudostem, composed of concentric layers of leaf sheaths.  Flowers grow along the stem in bundles called bunches and are subdivided into "hands." The individual fruits/bananas that develop from the hand are referred to as fingers.

Soon I will post my how to grow bananas segment, but for now a little background will prepare you for that step. Watch this video (there are 4 parts, this one and the second one contain most of the information mentioned here) for a nice visual and/or visit the link below for a wealth of information on bananas and their propagation.



PART 1 OF 4



References:
Greenearth Publishing: Banana Plant Growing Info