ItchyHands

Hello all,

My brother and I both picked up a giant dwarf each from a local nursery a few days back, knowing nothing about caring for them. I figured we could just do some research on the web to get a basic idea, and I ended up here. I had no idea there was such a community for banana plants. Awesome!

When i was at the nursery I was so distracted by my kids i didn't notice the leaf curl going on with this plant. Is this something to be concerned about like with other plants?

IMG_20140424_065103_142 by Ryan Reidy, on Flickr

Pallen

Welcome to the Community ItchyHands.
From what I see in the picture it looks like now more leaf dropping than my SDC has. I would not be worrying about them too much yet. Do you know exactly what type of Banana tree it is? We all enjoy pictures (Hint, Hint).
Read up on how to care for them and feel free to ask the community if you have any questions your research does not answer.

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It all started with one Super Dwarf Cavendish pup (My Blog)

cincinnana

Welcome to the Jungle!!!!!

Your plant looks better than some of mine .
I would not worry about the curl to much, your plant is young and will soon lose those "baby" leaves anyway.
The plant might have been under watered at the nursery.

First your leaves will yellow and brown then all you do is cut them off when they become unsightly.....do not panic, this is normal for your plant
and a new replacement leaf will take its place.

Repot soon in a container 3-4x while at the beginning of the growing season ......your going to need it


Have fun here..

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ItchyHands

The label identifies it as a- Musa acuminata "Enano Gigante"/ Dwarf Giant Banana. And I will post more pictures soon, hopefully!

Awesome! Should I plant it as is, or should I separate the three and plant them in their own pots?

Hammocked Banana

I would not worry. You have a type of cavendish banana similar to the store bought variety Grand Naine. Grand Naine means giant dwarf, while yours is the dwarf giant. I believe it gets a little taller than a GN (about 8-10' I believe) and is a dwarf version of the giant cavendish. Don't hold me to this I'm new to this too and these type of names always rattle me a little bit, but I know several members here are growing this one so you should be able to find more info here if you want. I would separate the plants because 1) You will have 3x as many plants, 2) Its much easier to separate pups when you have the whole root ball out of the container/ground, and 3) You will have less competition for water and nutrients and your plants will grow much faster if treated as 3 separate plants rather than one. Here is my experience with the situation with an unknown cavendish (probably GN or EG) that I bought for cheap which had 2 pups on the small plant already. Since I bought it just to add some ornamental appeal and fill some space in one of the tropical gardens, I left it all together to hopefully form a few nice tall stems by the end of the year. However the plants just never really seemed to grow all summer no matter what I did. So when I dug them up in the fall, I separated the 3 plants, potted them up separately, and tucked the small little "mother" plant under my growlights. Well that mother plant has tripled in size easily over the winter unexpectedly, I don't try push a lot of growth in winter even under my lights, the light is just to baby some key plants. When I separated the 3 plants I found the corms were kind of smooshed together and were growing around each other because of the limited space in the container when they were young. Separating the plants allowed the corms to fill out properly which then led to much better growth.

Here they are July 31, 2013


Oct 10, Little growth, should have been exponentially bigger.


Root ball uncovered a bit.


Pair of quick snaps


Big dent in pup's corm


Oct 18, Under lights (Front Left)


Apr 4, 2014 - Massive growth now that it has its own space (Front Right)

ItchyHands

Okay, so I separated the three plants and put them in their own 5 gal smart pots in a soil that's equal parts peat moss, perlite and composted chicken manure. And a few days later all three plants were looking pretty bad. All of their had wilted.



I thought maybe they were just in shock from the transplant, but I checked on them this morning before going to work and all three look even worse than they do in this pic. The leaves are beginning to brown and die.

We did have some pretty windy days the past few weeks in SoCal, could that be the cause? If not, anybody have any suggestions?

Thanks

Hammocked Banana

Chop off all the leaves except the newest cigar leaf. Roots got damaged when u separated them and now they dont have enough roots to take up as much water as they are losing through all those leaves, especially with all that wind. They'll be fine

ItchyHands

Thanks for your reply.
It looks like we're going to have another windy heat wave this week, should i move the plants inside until temps go back to normal?

Hammocked Banana

Just chop the leaves, heat will help metabolism. Maybe place pots in the shade.