Quote:
Originally Posted by larry
Hello All:
My name is Larry. I am a retired Psychologist, 2007, who just moved to Arizona. I planted one Rajapuri and three Mysore Banana plants and they have doubled in size in less than three weeks. What do I use for fertilizer? they get 2-3 hours of indirest sunlight daily.
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Hi Larry,
Welcome to the forum. Good choice of fruiting bananas!
Fruiting varieties planted in the ground need about about 1 lb of available Nitrogen per year, a scant amount of Phosphorus, 1.5 lbs of available Potash, plus minor amounts of secondary and trace minerals. An ideal N-P-K formula would be 32-1-48, applied monthly for a total of 3 pounds per year (since it has 32% ~= 1/3 available Nitrogen by weight). You won't find this produced commercially. The good news is that the bananas plants will largely ignore excess Phosphorus so that you could cheaply buy a palm or citrus food with an N-P-K of 8-4-8 or 8-6-8 and all the minor elements (e.g., Vigoro or GroPower) and apply it monthly at a rate of 1 cup per plant (or 3 cups every 3 months), since 1 cup weighs about 1 pound and you'll need 1/0.08 = 12.5 lbs of the fertilizer per year to achieve 1 pound net of Nitrogen per year. For the extra potash: IF you are already supplying 1 lb of potash/year as in the above example, you need an additional 1/2 lb per year. Two example ways to get this would be:
7 pounds of wood ash (N-P-K about 0-0-5) per plant per year, or
2.25 pounds of Sul-Po-Mag (N-P-K = 0-0-22) per plant per year.
Take it easy with the Sul-Po-Mag. It is a dense material -- weigh it before you use it and don't apply more 3/4 pounds at a time. You can buy it cheaply (50 lbs for $20) at an agricultural supply store. Nurseries on the other hand often sell it at excessive prices.
