Growing Bananas

[allngood]

Bananas love Hilo and East Hawaii.
They like water, humidity, and sunshine.

Selecting your plants.
Cavendish / Williams
1) Grow to 10 - 12 ft
2) Good production year round
Apple Bananas / Dwarf Brazilian
1) Grow to 15 - 20 ft
2) Harvest is low in spring and and summer
Chose disease free plants
Bunchy Top Virus - Know where plants are from
Nematodes - Clean keikis by trimming off roots and washing

Planting Bananas
Choose well drained, sunny area with room for bananas to "stretch out". 6' X 6 size area per mat. Bananas like to be planted deep. 12" puka minimum.
Prep puka with lime and super phosphate 0 - 30 - 0

Fertilizing Bananas
10 - 5 - 40 monthly - Sulfur coated nitrogen
Lime twice a year with Dolomite 65 or Dolomite Prills

Maintenance
Weed control. Hand weeding, mulch, or Roundup
Trim dead or dying leaves
Prune keikis Leave 1- 2 per mother plant.
Be sure to choose sword keikis (narrow leaf). Keiki with wide leafs are water suckers. ( usually not attached to mother plant and poor producers )

Harvesting
Harvest when green bananas are size you want. Hang and allow to ripen.
Bananas are sweeter if allowed to start ripening before harvest, but become difficult to work with when very ripe.
Cut small V in stalk about 3ft above ground. ( 1/3 way thru stalk ). Grab leaf or shake stalk and slowly pull stalk down. Cut top of stem with cane knife and catch bunch. Chop stalk into smaller pieces.

Let me know if anyone needs more information.
allngood@gmail.com

[StillHope]

Thank you for the info,Allngood!
How about red bananas?
I really like them.

[asly]

I'm new to growing bananas, but very interested. Are you saying that you leave the couple of keiki on the plant, then after you harvest the bananas you cut the mother plant down leaving the keiki to replace the mother. Or do you cut off keiki completely and plant on it's own?

http://crazypineappledream.blogspot.com/

[allngood]

Stillhope, the Cuban Red is common in Hawaii, as well as others. Although they maybe plantains ( cooking bananas )and not a desert banana. There are more than 1,000 varieties of bananas. Cultivation is the same.

Asly, as a matter of regular maintenance, prune off unwanted keikis leaving 1 or 2. View it as mother, daughter, grand daughter. Leave the attached keikis, they grow much fast than individual planted ones.
Extra plants can be used to start new mats. Harvest bunch and chop up stalk of mother plant. Pruning is an option, but when left unpruned banana mats get overcrowded and create homes for rubbish, insects, rats and the like.

[asly]

Thanks for the info allen, and for the photos!! Sounds like you know your bananas! We're excited to try this. Are bananas harvest year-round, meaning do you cut off a big bunch off of one plant yet you still have more bunches growing on it and ripening at different times. I'm thinking of my blueberries on my farm in WA, our harvest takes place over a 3 month period and is hand labor intensive because they ripen throughout the season. The mid-season berries are always the sweetest.

I've also seen postings where it's written to use animal manures, if bananas grow so fast and are such heavy eaters, isn't there a danger of ecoli or something like that?

Are bananas considered an "annual" because you would harvest fruit off of the daugther the next year?

Best, Ann

http://crazypineappledream.blogspot.com/

[StillHope]

quote:

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Originally posted by allngood

Stillhope, the Cuban Red is common in Hawaii, as well as others. Although they maybe plantains ( cooking bananas )and not a desert banana. ..

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I don't know about the other plantains,but small red ones are as desert as it comes.

[Kapohocat]

myth or true? I was told to wait for the flower to fall off the stalk before harvesting the bananas.

[allngood]

Stillhope, sorry cant be much help with identifying the red banana you ask about. Generally, the rare varieties were poor performers for production fields.

Ann, a banana plant produces one bunch and is cut down, Managing the keikis will continue the production and plant population. Harvesting is done year round, every week. I have no information about manures and ecoli. Manure was not a good option for my operation.

Kapohocat, we cut the flower off when bunch formed. It attracts insect that scar and chew the bananas. We harvested strictly by size.

[Carey]

Kapohocat - In one of my farm field trips (perhaps R. Ha's farm, or somewhere on the otherside???) I remember hearing to cut the flower before all of the 'petals' opened to increase the quality of the hands on the stalk & to reduce bug infestations.... but this is from the dusty bins of the memory, not a class notebook!

[StillHope]

The other thing is that in the US they gas to ripen bananas!(N2O).

Sometimes,the less you know...