Rmplmnz

A rather large Saba bloom..not many leaves left after the difficult winter...but man o man what a bloom..........

April 28, 2009
[IMG][/IMG]
[IMG][/IMG]
[IMG][/IMG]

April 30, 2009
[IMG][/IMG]

Getting close..................
[IMG][/IMG]
[IMG][/IMG]

harveyc

__________________

chong

Beautiful! Felicidades!!!!

harveyc

Does this plant have some strong suckers? It looks like there is one in the second picture. While this plant at least has some nice leaves (unlike my supposed Raja Puri on which I over-wintered a bunch), but I've been wondering if suckers can help feed the bunch on the mother plant. I think maybe so, and other people have responded they think probably so. Maybe you can cut all your leaves off to help test it out. Just joking!

__________________

frog7994

great pic of your Saba bloom.

momoese

Remember the Hawaiian Apple that snapped in half at the roof line and then decided to bloom? It was attached to many pups and many adult plants but the fruit never matured. I have also had plants bloom then loose all their leaves due to wind or frost and those fruits never matured either.

Tog Tan

The so called protocol here is to remove all or just leave one pup as the plant starts to bloom. Then as the fruits are fully formed, the bud is removed. This way the plant can concentrate all its energy in building up the fruits. With this method, we get more and bigger fruits. Allowing pups to be with the fruiting plant and the bud to keep on growing only saps its energy.
Do you guys do the same?

__________________



____
Tog Tan has sadly suddenly passed away 6/16/09. We will miss you Tog Tan.

momoese

I struggle with that because I'm growing them for the foliage as well as the fruit. I do try to keep them under control but it's not easy! Even with my mats a bit out of control I still get nice sized bunches so I'm not too worried about it.

Rmplmnz

This particular plant has one sword sucker with only very thin long leaves. We did have one bunch (pictures earlier within the thread), a Hua Moa that was able to take a raceme to maturity. Our experience with bananas with few or no leaves is that the fruit will never develop (stays very small and starchy)...we probably have 8 or 9 bunches this year (and a dozen or so last year) that the fruit never developed on (they stayed very small..even though the quantity of hands/fruit was normal).

The pseudostem may look thick....but it is relatively thin (for a 20 plus foot saba) and will have to be propped with bamboo to support the raceme. We rarely if ever prop saba racemes with bamboo...only when they are thin due to frost damage (hindering development).

These will come in handy:

[IMG][/IMG]

harveyc

Tog, I generally try to do that (but get behind sometimes), though I tend to try to keep pups of two sizes attached. However, I'm talking of leaving lots of pups attached when the mother plant has lost all of its leaves (either because of frost or wind damage, like Mitchel is talking about). Some people have said the pups help, but Mitchel's experience contradicts that. Since pups are attached to the mother corm, I could see that they might provide food to it or suck food out. I've never seen anything scientific reported on how things work. Maybe Gabe can chime in.

__________________

momoese

Harvey, you remember the thread about the albino AeAe pups taking energy from the mother plant until either the mother or the albino died? Food for thought.

harveyc

Yeah, I do remember that. Naturally, in that situation, food can go only one way. However, if pups are producing food and mom is not, can it go the other way? I am not proposing one way or the other, just wondering. Some think it's possible. So far, evidence seems to show it doesn't work. On my leafless plant I am making sure that the psuedostem has green parts showing so that the bunch might get fed from the energy produced from the psuedostem itself. They're pretty good size already (had been around 4 months old before winter set in), so I'm just hoping for a little more.

__________________

Tog Tan

Non-scientifically speaking, The clump of plants are all attached to each other by the corm and they feed as a single unit but with the strongest individual taking up the bulk of the food. If the main plant is in its fruit production stage, the food intake is maximum. Having other pups/plants around will only take away much of the needed nutrition. In the case you mentioned about damaged leaves on the fruiting plant, maybe, just maybe, the leaves on the pups helped by doing the work of photosynthesis for the group as a unit giving nutrition to the one bearing fruit.
On the other hand, if there is no fruit production, the pups will help in the overall growth as they have the extra number of leaves on them for photosynthesis. I guess that's why over here with the constant favorable condition, clumps get bigger and bigger with everyone bringing home the food through combined photosynthesis!
Plants with the pups and bud removed always give the max in production here. It is a practice over the ages and these people are not scientifically minded.

Mitchel, albinos once detached will always die. Undetached, it's is only a matter of time. If they able to grow, the main plant is supplying as much nutrition as it can. Remember that Variegated plants are weak plants as a big portion of their work surface/leaf does not have the ability to photosynthesize, so feeding another albino plant which does no photosynthesis at all on its own will put alot of stress on it.
In the case of a seed germinated albino, the kaput time is even shorter. Before the embryo is sucked up, it is gone.
These are observations I have made in the field. C'mon, whack me!

__________________



____
Tog Tan has sadly suddenly passed away 6/16/09. We will miss you Tog Tan.

Bananaman88

Maybe my example was an anomoly, but my experience (and again, it was only one time) is that pups do help the mother plant when she has lost most of her leaves due to frost. It may not work that way the majority of the time, but it worked for me in this one instance. It would be good to see an experiment on this.

chong

Yes, it does work that way. When my Grandmother used to "prune" the mother banana in order to hasten the blooming and lower the fruiting height, she made sure that there were at least 2 succeeding pups of certain stage. I didn't know it at the time, but I now realize that it was so that the mother plant would have nutrition through the pups.

Bananaman88

Chris,

Any of your Pitogos looking like they're going to fruit yet?

Rmplmnz

No....hopefully summer;-)

Rmplmnz

A few pics of some of the Banana Racemes in the garden (nice comparison photos):