Most people don't plan to fail, they fail to plan.
It seems that you're taking something simple and easy and making it more complicated than it needs to be.
Plantain farmers here start by figuring out when they want to harvest and then subtract the days it takes the plant to complete the vegetative and fruiting phases. This let's farmers know when to plant.
Once northern growers learn to plan they'll probably buy planting material that's at the proper stage of maturity for same season harvest.
Removing most of the above ground stem is done just to reduce shipping cost.
This might be a more simple way of understanding this. Let's say you have a banana in a pot on the back porch that is going to flower tomorrow and you move it to the front porch at midnight. Now it will flower at it's new location in less than 24 hours because of it's stage of maturity when it was moved there.
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Originally Posted by sirdoofus
OK, so I am a bit confused (happens regularly). The plants you ship to the northern US border aren't necessarily cut vertically, as the pics as I see them would suggest?
And the plants in the pics I am assuming are shipped as pictured and it sounds like you are suggesting they don't necessarily need to be manipulated (i.e.vertically cut) in order to flower and fruit in one season...as long as there is enough time; which of course makes sense but it surprises me there would be enough time on the North Dakota/Saskatchewan border, for example.
Do your clients in the north regularly find they have enough time to get one of your plants to flower and fruit in a single season? If so, do you know what, if any manipulation they might be doing to get that to happen? Do they tend to grow in the ground or in containers?
If you were going to cut one of those pictured plants vertically, when would you do that? There clearly isn't enough height on that plant as pictured to keep the bunch off the ground, so if you were doing it, when would you cut it? And I am assuming you try to save as many leaves as possible when making a vertical cut?
Maybe I would just be better off root pruning the plants?
Sorry so many questions, but I am very interested in the possibility of shortening the overall cycle on in-ground plants and just maybe getting something to fruit. If you have a resource(s) with this info you can point me towards, I will stop bothering you  |