Francesco

A friend of mine, told me that a boy from Sry Lanka described him a trick to force a normal banana to have a dwarfing behaviour.
He made what he call "Smart trimming" of the banana in the Spring, by cutting the pseudost. at about one meter level.

Such operation should force to obtain a regrown of babana at half highness of the normal (2 mt at the place of 4 mt...), but more vigorous and with better fruit shape!

Who else knows and/or tried this trick?
And eventually what was his results?

inkcube

what you are doing is cutting the leaves that have yet to unroll, effectively preventing them from exserting and elongating. the leaves exserting from the center will be those that were destined to be the later leaves in the plant's growth cycle, i have done this hundreds of time as i am sure others here have - it is an effective way to make an 8 ft tall plant fit into the house in the fall. as far fruit production, i have seen no indication that this does what it is claimed to do, theoretically it makes sense as the plant does not have to use resources to develop the leaves that are removed and can use them for fruit (most likely this would not happen) - i know of no plantation in Central America that does this to improve fruit production.

asacomm

I also have tried this cutting for some other reason.
But it resulted in poor fruiting, smaller size and less fingers.

inkcube

the process can be stressful, after all, you are cutting the trunk back and removing leaves, storage reserves - basically causing damage to the plant. while some plants will put all their reserves into a last flower under stress or damage (emergency flowering) this rarely results in plentiful fruit.

the flying dutchman

You need a certain amount of healthy leaves to support the fruit.
Gabe has posted the exact number somewhere but I can't find it.


Ron

sandy0225

I don't know if it will give you a better fruit, I actually kind of doubt that. But if your banana plants are getting too tall and large for you to handle otherwise, cutting them off seems to work just fine. They grow back and are shorter than they were before. They do come back rapidly because they have a bigger root mass than a one meter banana plant normally would.
The one caveat seems to be that if your plant has a bloom already forming inside the stalk, when you cut it, you may either cut the bloom stalk off completely, or you may end up with a plant that just shoves the bloom stalk out of the center with no leaves at all, or only one or two leaves and a bloom stalk. In that case, you've pretty much ruined your chance for decent fruit. So you want to make sure you know where your plant is age-wise so that you're not risking that.

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inkcube

not tied directly to leaf count since flowering can occur anywhere between leaf 25 and leaf 50, a general consensus is depending on the clone floral initiation begins between leaf 26 - 31.

the flying dutchman

I meant actually you need a certain amount of leaves to let the fruit
develop and ripen properly, so just as Sandy said, you might end up
with a flowering plant with not enough leaves to support it.
I could be wrong, hope Gabe can tell us.


Ron

inkcube

from one of my papers: "In the ‘Grand Nain’ banana floral initiation takes place at 26 -31 leaves when grown in the field, at this time about 12 leaves remain on the plant." generally in the field (a plantation) between 6-12 leaves are needed to support the flower. generally it is around 10-15 but can be more on a vigorous plant, up to 25.