The Puffer Forum

The Japanese Fiber Bananas have sprouted, with a couple of dozen plants pushing through the mulch as of yesterday afternoon. Only a couple show any leaf unfurling as yet, but the spouts are up as high as foot, just still tightly furled.

We are in an unusual Spring dry spell, and I have not yet turned on the outdoor taps. I guess that I have to do that today. They are very thirsty plants. Their final height is directly related to the moisture level in their soil.

Very cool! We want picks when they grow.

Absolutely

Congrats...lol. I do little bit of growin plants in the yard. Got a Red Japanese Maple in the ground this year. 1st stated out as a seedling last spring and not its over 2 foot tall....lol And got 2 seedling Red (Bloodgood) Japanese Maples I started growin. All of them was from my dads trees. But anyways.....

You should grow some of them bright blue bannanas that glow in the dark.

I limit the non-hardy bananas I grow to one or two cultivars. I used to do Dwarf Cavendish because the fruit easily and well. It is cool to have true tropicals fruiting in the temperate zones. But it is also heavily manual labor, and I can no longer do that.

I have cut the DCs, and am currently growing only one non-hardy cultivar which is likely a sport of a fairly recent sport, with highly colored leaves and good clump growth form. It does not fruit very well in my handling.

The hardy bananas got a new bed this year. The original was just 4x4s rather sloppily done by yours truly. The new bed frame is 6x6s and looks sooo much better - It was not DIY. No location change, just replacing the DIY 4x4s with heavier and fat neater timbers,

We got sprout shots of the emerging plants and will hopefully get them posted this weekend. The look roughly as much like cypress knees as anything else ATM - even though they have no wood. We will add unfurling shots as the happen we add unfurling shots as it happen. My niece insists that we post this years shots on-line. She has spent much of her life in the tropic, now lives in Alaska, and is suffering tropical withdrawal.

I'll post the links as soon as we get them up. I have to find my passwords...

Congrats!! I know how excited you are. We live in a zone 3 environment and I have two zone 5 trees that survived a transplant and the winter (unusually mild) and are starting to bud. One is a dogwood and the other is a self cloning cherry. I am very happy that they did well and hope the roots tap well to continue until next spring

What growing zone are you in, RTR?

I think that we are 6B. The map is spotty in our area due to the hills/mountains, everything is a different micro-climate. The NE corner beds are at least a half-zone or maybe a full zone colder than the rest of the property - I can summer-out the non-hardies there, but the hardies would be unlikely to survive. Pampas grass does not survive here on the ridge, but is okay in the valleys on either side. Mountain laurel is the understory on the eastern side of the ridge, but requires careful placement to survive on my side of the ridge, the west side. Ravena grass is fine on the slope down to the garages, but will not winter over reliably in the NE corner beds - where it would be great looking.

The hardy banana are the western border of the turn-around outside of the garages on the South side if the house. The house is a mid-centry modern raised ranch style running east to west, so somewhat shelters the bed from the worst of the winter storms, but is frequently snow or ice-covered much of the winter. That is actually protective. In the early winter the trunks are cut back near the ground after being well- frozen and the bed mulched with composted cow manure, 300+ ponds of the stuff, then topped with 4-6 inches of fine-chip bark mulch. The bed is well-covered with soaker hoses. The bed is truncated right angle with the corner lopped off to ease turning cars. The first one-third is over 20 years old, the outer two-thirds is a bit under 20 years. I ran the first section a few years as a trial before I added the last two-thirds. Once we get some pictures from the south deck the simple layout will be easily visible. Depending on how much I water, the foliage reaches it least the top of the south deck arbor before the end of the season, so at least 18' high, but to date has not reached the level of the roof ridge. The look is dense tropical, as you cannot see through the bed once the plants are well established.

I used to all the upkeep myself, but is contacted out these days. The frozen/thawed trunks are massively heavy and just too much for me these days. They do compost fairly quickly as they are not woody. Those fibers in the trunks are astonishingly long and strong. That is job for a much younger and stronger landscape architect.

The watering is still my chore, but relatively easy. Between the tanks and outdoor watering (we tend to summer droughts) it keeps me at penalty water rates. But to me it is well worth it. I come from a long line of gardeners.

RTR wrote:I think that we are 6B. The map is spotty in our area due to the hills/mountains, everything is a different micro-climate. The NE corner beds are at least a half-zone or maybe a full zone colder than the rest of the property - I can summer-out the non-hardies there, but the hardies would be unlikely to survive. Pampas grass does not survive here on the ridge, but is okay in the valleys on either side. Mountain laurel is the understory on the eastern side of the ridge, but requires careful placement to survive on my side of the ridge, the west side. Ravena grass is fine on the slope down to the garages, but will not winter over reliably in the NE corner beds - where it would be great looking.

The hardy banana are the western border of the turn-around outside of the garages on the South side if the house. The house is a mid-centry modern raised ranch style running east to west, so somewhat shelters the bed from the worst of the winter storms, but is frequently snow or ice-covered much of the winter. That is actually protective. In the early winter the trunks are cut back near the ground after being well- frozen and the bed mulched with composted cow manure, 300+ ponds of the stuff, then topped with 4-6 inches of fine-chip bark mulch. The bed is well-covered with soaker hoses. The bed is truncated right angle with the corner lopped off to ease turning cars. The first one-third is over 20 years old, the outer two-thirds is a bit under 20 years. I ran the first section a few years as a trial before I added the last two-thirds. Once we get some pictures from the south deck the simple layout will be easily visible. Depending on how much I water, the foliage reaches it least the top of the south deck arbor before the end of the season, so at least 18' high, but to date has not reached the level of the roof ridge. The look is dense tropical, as you cannot see through the bed once the plants are well established.

I used to all the upkeep myself, but is contacted out these days. The frozen/thawed trunks are massively heavy and just too much for me these days. They do compost fairly quickly as they are not woody. Those fibers in the trunks are astonishingly long and strong. That is job for a much younger and stronger landscape architect.

The watering is still my chore, but relatively easy. Between the tanks and outdoor watering (we tend to summer droughts) it keeps me at penalty water rates. But to me it is well worth it. I come from a long line of gardeners.

You definitely put a lot of thought into all your planting and layout. It sounds very gorgeous, too.

I have raised the non-hardy bananas for afew years until they finally gave up. But sounds like you have some beautiful landscape though.

Bananas fruit and that pseudostem then dies. But there are always offsets/"pups" before the parent plant expires. Those offsets can be planted out to develop and fruit. It normally takes me about three growing seasons to get a stem to fruiting size and strength. Bananas are pigs - they want food and water in non-trivial quantities. The mid-Atlantic coast and the mountains behind it are unfortunately not a rainforest. I just like it to look a bit like one.

We always called them suckers rather then pups. But we use to grow banana trees here also and it's nothing close to a Rain forest here either. Back breakin diggin and replanting each season finally got the best of me. My back is not in the best shape anymore so I finally laid it all down. Beautiful trees and loved them while it lasted though.

When we lived in Silver Spring MD, I used non-hardy tropicals only. I too was much younger then. I had not then heard of the "hardy" bananas. You do not get bloom or fruit, but with mulching they are fully hardy here. That means that really heavy work comes only once. Adding the composted cow poop is not exactly a day at the beach, but I could still do it. But I trained the young and strong and hungry landscape architect (the son of one of our Drs.) in hardy banana care and now he does the winter frozen stem removal and the follow-up feeding and mulching. Despite the economy's bad effects on my retirement funds, it is worth paying for to me.

The first report of the sprouts was with 2o young trees breaking through the surface. Yesterday we were up to 35. By full leaf-out we usually have 50-70 stems. That is enough to produce a dense bed at late summer/early fall maximum size.

These, like many bananas are really rhizomatous plants, with sprouts arising from a persistent underground rhizome. It is the rhizome which is hardy, not the pseudo-stem. The Japanese Hardy Banana is in fact of Chinese origin, imported into Japan so long ago (for the fibers) that they are consider native by the Japanese. There are a couple of other plants only slightly less hardy, but I have not worked with them. These are enough to fill my need for a heavy hint of the tropics.

In the tropics, the plant is considered very invasive, capable of taking over villages. Where freezes occur, this is highly unlikely. This does not have the potential to be as invasive as bamboo can be.

So these hardy Japanese bananas dont need to be dug up and stored for the winter months like the tropical one do in colder climates? Sound very interesting. I really do miss my tropical bananas but my back is not in the greastest shape nowdays.

Btw, you are not joking about bananas love tons of water, very rich soil, and food. And sounds like you have a jungle going on there.