Clare_CA

Any ideas? Am I not fertilizing enough? Not removing pups enough?

I have so many bananas with tiny fruit. It is just making me crazy. So far, the ones with tiny fruit have been Raja Puri, Dwarf Brazilian, Pisang Ceylon, Goldfinger, and possibly 1000 fingers.

The bigger ones in the same soil with the same water and fertilizer are Dwarf Cavendish, Pseudo Ice Cream, and, of course, Cardaba.

Here are some pictures of my tiny ones. Mark and I have discussed this as maybe being a mineral deficiency in the soil. Anyone else have this problem?

Raja Puri:



Pisang Ceylon:



1000 fingers:



Goldfinger:



This Pseudo Ice Cream is pretty small also:



For comparison, bigger pseudo Ice Cream and Dwarf Cavendish and Cardaba:







Thanks for any help.

sunfish

I believe thousand finger only makes tiny fruit

Gabe15

What kind of fertilizing do you do? What kind, how much, and how often?

There are few other things going on here:

You should not judge the size of the fruit when they are so young, they will grow in both width and length as they mature, and some varieties start out with long ovaries that don't get much longer, while others will lengthen drastically as they develop. Bananas also put on a lot of size right at the end in the last month or so. The Raja Puri and Goldfinger are both way too young to judge the size of the fruit. The Pisang Ceylon also has lots of time to grow.

The 'Thousand Fingers' looks to b a very new bunch, but hard to tell from the photo. This is an odd variety in that the flower order is reversed, the first few hands that appear are basically male flowers which do not develop into fruit, and the remaining hands are then female which turn into the fruit. Even if this plant is well fed and exhibiting maximum growth, the fruit is still very small.

The other thing you may be experience is what is called "genotype by environment interactions" (or GxE). This basically means that for no good explainable reason, some cultivars will act very differently (good or bad) in particular environments, even if the environment is very good for some varieties. Bananas are very diverse genetically, and so this type of thing happens a lot where some varieties just will not do as well no matter what.

The 'Ice Cream' looks more like it suffered some cold spells in its development or was severely malnourished at some point. How tall is it?

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

Clare_CA

Thanks, Tony. I suppose tiny and fat is okay, but tiny and thin is ridiculous. When you peel the banana, you only get about an inch of fruit. It makes it not worth growing that variety in that case.

Clare_CA

Thanks for your help, Gabe. I can't remember right now what I did last year. I think I put a cupful of slow-release fertilizer pellets, like 13-13-13, down at each mat, and I think I used the water soluable MiracleGro a couple of times as well.

The Raja Puri has pupped and flowered like crazy with as many as four flowers at once. I have let the fruit go to maturity four or five times, and the fruit has always remained super small when the fruit begins to yellow. This mat has gotten so big because of the massive pupping that I just had to take it out as it outgrew the area that I had it in.

Thanks for that information about the GxE. That is really helpful.

I will wait and see about the others because you are right that the Goldfinger, Pisang Ceylon, and 1000 fingers are in the beginning stages of fruiting, and this is the first time that all three have fruited. Perhaps the fruit will become bigger over time.

There are actually two Pseudo Ice Creams in the picture. I'm not sure which one you are referring to. The first one that has just a few fruit is fruiting for the first time and taking a long time to mature. I think that was sold to me as a 'Misi Luki' by Stokes Tropicals. That one is only about six feet tall. The other pseudo 'Ice Cream' is much taller. I would guess that it is closer to ten or twelve feet tall. I just harvested some fruit, and I have one more bunch on that mat.