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Originally Posted by curriedrice
GreenFin - thanks, I trimmed off the brown leaves in winter. Now I'll know not to do that!
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You can trim off the brown (dead) ones. Your problem wasn't that you trimmed off the dead leaves, it was that the leaves died over the winter. Losing all your leaves isn't necessarily a major problem so long as the p-stem has time to send out a good number of new leaves before sending out the flower. So your real problem was really one of timing: the p-stem happened to flower at a time when the leaves had died and had not yet been replaced.
Quote:
Originally Posted by curriedrice
I've had good luck with using fertilizer such as fish meal to promote plant and leaf growth but haven't tried this on bananas. Any suggestions? Yes, I know not to over to do it.
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I grow my bananas entirely on fish waste (ammonia and poop) and worms castings (they eat the fish poop and then do their own pooping), and they've grown great so far. They're all young, though, so I don't know how the fruit will turn out yet.
BTW, I should emphasize "entirely" and "so far." I grow my bananas in a gravel bed, not soil, so virtually all of the nutrition the bananas get is from the fish/worm waste. They've grown exceptionally fast so far, but it's possible that there are nutrient deficiencies which hurt the fruit quality/yield without affecting the vegetative growth. Hopefully it works out though. (My suspicion is that I'll get fruit, but that it'll be a small bunch of so-so fruit, and that I'll have to add some nutritional supplements to get good fruit production, but we'll see.)