Gabe15

Hello and welcome!

Seeded bananas are normally very heavily seeded, and not good for eating as compared to other common fruits with seeds, they are not at all like eating watermelon or oranges...maybe comparable to a heavily seeded guava (not the nice, large, low seed count cultivars with lots of pulp), but even the heavily seeded guava I find easier to eat than a seeded banana. That being said, there are some different seeded bananas that are eaten (usually as famine food or prepared in some type of specific dish), and they can taste good, but breeding bananas, even seeded ones, is no easy task.

They are very heterozygous, which is good for creating lots of diverse progeny, but if your aim is to be able to have a uniform hybrid plant which you can replant the seeds of, its just not going to be practical for bananas as every seedling will be different, and you will be forced to propagate asexually and thus end up with clones, which it sounds like you are trying to avoid.

Its important to think about what you really want to do; grow bananas, or just mess around with their genetics (which I totally agree is very fun, I do it too, but its not practical for food production). If in the end you really want to grow some food for yourself, I would recommend that you research the different edible varieties and select some that would likely do well in your area, because there are many different varieties and some definitely do better than others in a given environment. If you really want the challenge of breeding a seeded banana, I would recommend working within the Rhodochlamys section to start, these include the species Musa ornata, M. velutina/dasycarpa, M. laterita and a few others (but those are the most common), they are easy to grow and fruit quickly and readily cross with each other. If breeding is all you want to do with your banana collection, do not expect to producing anywhere near the amount of food you can produce with a full on edible cultivar.

My recommendation for your total solution would be to first start researching a little more in depth about bananas, they are very different from most crops and have many interesting and unique aspects of their reproductive physiology that dictate how they cultivated and improved. Then, take a good look at the edible ("seedless") varieties out there, and consider some that would suit your needs, they will be much appreciated and very rewarding if you take good care of them. And finally, perhaps after you know you can grow bananas, get a few seeded varieties to add to your collection and start messing around, but again, know that a seeded banana, by the very nature of it having seeds (along with a few other technical issues) will never be an equal replacement for an edible cultivar.

I hope this helps and stimulates more thought and questions on the subject, do not hesitate to post more questions if you have them.

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Growing bananas in Colorado, Washington, Hawaii since 2004. Commercial banana farmer, 200+ varieties.