meizzwang

I've thought about this a lot, but it seems under semitropical to mediterranean climates, it's not yet economically feasible to time them. I've come up with a hypothetical model below that may work based on growing observations.

Without being able to control the environment (ie. light, temperature, water, nutrients, and air flow) you won't likely be able to time your blooms since you're at the mercy of mother nature to control temperature and light. With a greenhouse, you have a chance at timing your flowers. Once you're familiar with how a particular cultivar "behaves" under your specific environmental conditions and care (and note: the way you water and feed them has to be consistent for this to work), you can predict more or less when they will flower. For example, I know under my conditions and care, the first ratoon of American goldfinger blooms at around 11' of p-stem, provided that first ratoon had full sun, had 4 or less other p-stems competing for nutrients on the same Mat, had excess water sprouts and sword suckers gouged out in a timely fashion, wasn't ever water-stressed, produced many large sized leaves, was consistently fed well, and didn't have to compete with other suckers for light.

Let's assume I'm trying to time the first ratoon of american goldfinger and the plant behaves exactly the same way under greenhouse conditions:it blooms at 11' of p-stem when growth is optimized for each P-stem. This also assumes that the first ratoon starter material are all precisely uniform in the size of corm, leaves, girth of P-stem, etc. Starting in the beginning of the grow season (spring) you'll want to push all of your first ratoon pups to get to around 10.5' of P-stem by keeping the day and night temperature optimal for photosynthesis (approx. 80F or so). Once they reach that height (hopefully by end of fall), you'll want to stop their growth by lowering both day and night temps to be constantly between 45-60F (if you're growing a very frost sensitive cultivar, you'll want to keep the temps between 55-60F day and night). Stop fertilizing at this "dormancy" stage and keep the soil slightly damp but not very wet. In late winter or right before spring, bump up the day and night temperatures back to 80F, bump up the fertilizer to normal grow season amounts, supplement light when you have cloudy days, and you probably won't get it to the exact day, but you can probably time them to all bloom within a week or two of each other in the spring.

Here's an interesting though:through breeding or selecting from new, untested landrace material, it's very possible that we can develop a new cultivar that can be forced to bloom in the spring (ie. a mutant that blooms consistently with the decrease of dark hours at a certain sized p-stem). It's also very possible to genetically engineer bananas to bloom in response to a particular stimulus.

I'm guessing in the tropics, where you have very consistent weather, growers are already able to predict how much they will harvest and when based the day the first flowers opens or when a bunch is at a particular stage of maturation. They also have ginormous fields of plants, which gives them a constant harvest all year round. Perhaps this is why there hasn't been a push for growers to figure out how to time flowering.