PR-Giants

Making a short-cycle like the Patupi or Veinte Cohol bloom a few months earlier should give the plant enough time to fill the fruit properly before cold weather becomes a problem.

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scottu

?

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Viva La Banana

edwmax

Thanks, but how do one get these to bloom early?

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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.

kaczercat

green fin has had great sucess with all types in a semi pit greenhouse (zone 6 OK). I bet he could throw some insight. This is very interesting ++

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Matt

Snarkie

Get my cat to force them at gunpoint. That'll straighten 'em out.

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"Nuke my 'nanners, will you?!"

Snarkie

Now seriously, I would think that tenting them with clear plastic and using a heat lamp at night, would get them growing earlier. You could get possibly two month's head-start, depending on your locale.

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"Nuke my 'nanners, will you?!"

obdiah

I have had good luck on pineapples putting half a ripe apple in the crown or a small cloth bag of calcium carbide its the ethylene gas from the apple or acetylene from the calcium carbide when it gets damp that does the trick not sure if it would work on bananas or not

PR-Giants

When it comes to growing bananas most of the time you just need a little common sense but sometimes connecting the dots can be elusive.


Most folks know


… that chopping the top off of a banana plant reduces both yield and fruit size, the more mature the plant the more dramatic the damage.

… that after chopping the top off a large banana plant it quickly regains most of it's height and needs multiple chopping before letting it set new leaves to achieve the desired result.

… that chopping the top off of an older banana plant will often cause it's bud to quickly emerge.

… that it takes several months for the bud to emerge after the growing point passes ground level.



I don't know why top chopping negatively effects yield, but would think it has to do with the stress of temporarily stopping food production.



Will continually chopping off the new growth while leaving the existing leaves intact force the bud to emerge earlier?

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Snarkie

Since you are an expert in bananas as I am in redwoods, this would be the same kind of opportunity that I look for, in answering questions on dawns. I am continually looking for new questions and puzzles with dawns, as no one else is. So...

Can you experiment with this, doc the results and then let us know? From a wing nut to a banana nut, I'd be curious to see what you could dig up.

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"Nuke my 'nanners, will you?!"

PR-Giants

Already done.


Be specific.

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Snarkie

Specifically, put down that bag of popcorn and watch the movie!

Seriously, did you find a way to do this? What were your observations?

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The Only Eastern Redwood Forest in America




"Nuke my 'nanners, will you?!"

PR-Giants

It took about a half second to figure out how to do it and two tries to come up with a way to do it in under 30 seconds, gotta keep things simple.

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Snarkie

And the guy that posted his question had a simple answer, right?

We are all here to learn. And share.

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"Nuke my 'nanners, will you?!"

PR-Giants

It should take a few more months to finish collecting the data from one of the control groups, but those numbers are not important to the average hobbyist.



Veinte Cohol

Projected fruit filling period was set for 6 weeks

At 3 weeks the fruit was already filled to an acceptable harvest size.

Prior to 5 weeks the top hand fruit size was 100+mm X 35mm, and as normal for the VC the peel and fruit began splitting.

For whatever reason the fruit filled substantially faster than in the control bunches.

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geissene

If it was a pure control group, the data should be collected at the same time as the experimental group. In order to keep the conditions as consistent as possible.

Regardless, it would be interesting to know what was done to expedite the fruit to mature.


Erik

Snarkie

Well, when you're not getting funding from a university or taxpayer-supported grant, private field research tends to be done a little differently; quite often with the results locked inside your head. We tend to go by general observations over many years, which eventually culminates in an accepted theory.

Control groups are great for pencil-necked geeks who never got their pocket protectors out in the field, but no one drives their car on the interstate at 55 MPH with the windows rolled up and the AC turned off, to achieve the laboratory claims.

This is why no one knew the Suzuki Samurai was such a rollover risk, until my uncle (facility manager for Consumer Reports' Auto Test Division) was driving it to work one morning and tried to steer out of a 6" deep snow rut at 12 MPH. He hiked over to the track, got a camera, hiked back and took that now-famous shot of the Samurai laying on its side in the snow. Real world tests blew Suzuki's own carefully monitored research out of the water.

Now, getting back to what originally started this; the methods used by PR Giants for bananas and mine for dawn redwoods may differ slightly, but still rely on observations, not clinical trials. I trust field studies over lab studies any day when it comes to plants, because Mother Nature doesn't care about scales, temperatures or thermometers.

Not trying to be inflammatory. Just my two shiny pennies on the topic...

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geissene

I wasn't aware this was a private study. It is always interesting to see what experiments people are doing! It seems like forcing early blooms would certainly have some commercial value. You could better meet the supply / demand of the banana market.

Yea, if there is no peer review / journal publication / PhD thesis or such connected to this research project then years of observation from multiple people is an alternative. A true lab experiment might provide a deeper understanding of why this is happening for scientific value but it certainly isn't necessary for an average banana gardener to understand. Who knows, maybe this idea can get sunflower plants to bloom early or other things...

I think the banana might respond differently to chopping off growth depending on the growing conditions. So a side-by-side comparison would be very helpful but any information about the procedure and benefits would be a great starting point!

Snarkie

Everything on here is a private study! Every one of us on here makes notes and submits pics. This isn't a professional endeavor; but rather a think tank made up of amateurs, novices and pros who pool all of our knowledge and resources together. That is what makes this forum so unique and informative.

There are many pros on here, yes, but it is the collective of everyone's observations and reports that makes it work.

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"Nuke my 'nanners, will you?!"

PR-Giants

It should take a few more months to finish collecting the data from the last control group. That group consists of banana plants of the same cultivar planted at the same time but only included the plants that had similar pseudostem height and similar girth measured at 1 meter to the plants that were forced to bloom early. It was not possible to collect's all of the harvest data at the same time as the experimental group because the last group still has not flowered yet and I'm not expecting them to any time soon. After the last group blooms I should have a fairly accurate idea of when the experimental group would have bloomed.

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