Quote:
Originally Posted by bepah
Gabe,
Just a question, as you are more advanced in this than I.....
Why did you plant in tradition rows, rather than what might have been better use of the bananas rooting strength and plant in a hexagonal pattern and allow for unform root growth around each plant. I would imagine that any pups produced would be stronger and less crowded from the neighboring plants?
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I'm glad you brought this up, because plant spacing is actually a rather complex issue and not commonly a subject on our forum.
First off, I didn't plant these. They were planted by our adviser over the summer and given to the student group to manage. However, if I had planted them (and I am planting more at our farm), I would still have done the traditional rows. There are many advantages to having them in a row, especially in a commercial situation (which also takes into consideration some economic issues which are not issues for us). For us, we can easily run the irrigation lines on all the plants, allow easy access for vehicles to go between them (such as the large field mowers or other equipment), and as is inherent of using rows we have easy access to all of the plants. A hexagonal system might be useful somewhere, but for us, since we really aren't even growing that many plants, normal rows are easier. Also, we are not a banana farm, we are a farm with bananas, so we don't want to take up a huge area of our farm with a more complex planting system.
What your describing to me seems to basically be an aspect of any field planting, which is the spacing between each plant. This can vary from almost 20ft apart in some systems to 4ft apart in others. Spacing however is dependent on a few different things, such as the variety grown (some varieties take up more room than others), soil fertility, water availability and the need for access to the plants (on commercial farms they also allow for more room to prevent the fruit from being bruised by neighboring leaves and workers, so it is generally a little bit wider than is needed for healthy plants). The closer the plants are together, the more they are competing for the same nutrients, this could be an issue and affect how close you want your plants in a commercial setting, but since we have access to all of the water and fertilizer we need, competition between each plant shouldn't be an issue and they will have plenty of strength and not interfere with each other. If maximizing the space between each plant was needed, I would first opt for a square grid planting (such as 10ft between each plant in a row with rows 10ft apart). Also, the closer you plant them together, the more dense of a canopy you will develop to suppress weeds, which is a great benefit if your goal is to reduce nutrient competition in your field.
And as for crowding, this is a farm, not plants growing out in the wild, and we manage them. We will remove pups as needed and make sure they don't form huge mats that encroach on each other. If we were to let them grow out fully, we may see a loss in gross yield, but then again, we don't really care because we are just a student farm, not a commercial grower trying to maximize production with every trick in the book. Each grower has a specific need for their plants, if you need them to produce huge bunches you will adjust your planting system accordingly, but if you need them to be easy to manage and require little work to be put into them then you will too adjust your planting system according.