dsws

I'm a complete newbie: everything I know about bananas is from reading on here in the past couple weeks. But here's my take on plants "becoming sterile". The above-ground "banana tree" (pseudo-stem, or p-stem for short) is just one cluster of leaves from the corm (roots and underground stem). Each p-stem produces only one bloom, which only produces a limited number of hands. The same plant does produce more fruit, just not from the same pseudo-stem.

The pups you want to keep are the ones that grow directly from the corms, called "sword suckers"; they grow quite tall before starting to spread out their leaves. The ones to get rid of may grow a little farther from the previous p-stem, or may grow from cut bits of corm; they're called "water suckers" and they start looking like little banana plants right from the time they come out of the ground.