Edible Cold hardy Banana

Are you going to start a banana farm Clark? I bet that would be the only one in Kansas, I do like the look of hardy bananas, so tropical, one that would make fruit would be worth trying

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I believe the subzero refers to 0°C

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Richard,
They say “D&T Farm plants its seedlings in very chilly conditions, minus 76 degrees Fahrenheit, then thaws and replants them at warmer temperatures. The temperature-shifted bananas grow from seedlings to fruit in about nine months, and an interesting side effect of the process is a thinner banana peel. Without any pesticides, the peel is edible, from a practical standpoint”. Could be a lot of bananas being planted in a few years.

Having a skeptical nature this sounds like an April’s Fool joke.

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Here are a couple more links
http://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/2018/02/02/japanese-banana-variety-boasts-edible-skin-but-taste-testers-arent-going-bananas-over-it.amp.html

https://www.google.com/amp/amp.abc.net.au/article/9445178

I saw this a few weeks ago, Mongee Banana. Seems like a lot of hype for a crop of a half dozen bananas a week. Also, the premise of bananas having ice age DNA remnants does not seem to hold water, the tropics probably didn’t freeze during ice ages.

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I missed the entire thread @hoosierbanana . Didn’t realize I was double posting.

I probably could have done better with the thread title… I wish I could grow bananas, I’d be very happy to be wrong on this one.

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Sure would be nice to have bananas in the Midwest. We are getting closer I think.

The fruit of bananas grown from seed is not edible. The fruit will contain seeds hard as rocks and the size of peas scattered throughout the fruit. I am guessing this cultivar is a variant of the ornamental Veluntina – known for thin skin.

I know of folks in Kentucky, southern Illinois, and elsewhere that grow the ornamental variety Basjoo outdoors year-round. The leaves and stock go dormant and die to the ground but the underground corm sends up new growth every year. These are available from retailers for a few tens of dollars.

Yes that is probably true, but the land masses move on their plates in and out of the tropics. Michigan used to be under the ocean, well the west side was (why it is all sand there and blueberry country). the shoreline was the east side. 70 feet below me is a beach. We recently uncovered it to fix a waste disposal line. The sand is very nice down there I’m told. During repairs you could walk along this beach. This area used to be very low, but the glaciers built it up before they melted to form the Great Lakes.
When we were ocean side I think we were near the equator at that time.
It is estimated that during the last ice age as much as 90% of our population was killed.

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The areas in SE Asia where bananas evolved moved further into the tropics due to continental drift. They would have had a chance to adapt to colder regions in Australia when they migrated there, but still have not.

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Drew, those are completely different time scales. North America formed as a separate continent about 100 million years ago and moved to more or less its current location about 30 to 50 millions years ago. The last ice age occurred between 26 thousands to 13 thousands years ago (and the Great Lakes were formed by receding glaciers about 10 thousands years ago).

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Well that was the last ice age, yes, I was unclear I didn’t mean it occurred during the last ice age. Sorry you misunderstood. I was jumping all over and not very clear, my bad. What I meant to say that out of the 5 major ice ages, all land was probably under glaciers at some point in time. it was regarding the statement that the tropics are probably ice free during the ice age. Well maybe the last ice age, but not all ice ages. I was trying to say is what we call the tropics depends what year it is and where the land is.

Well our current location is only temporary, it’s still moving.

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If I remember correctly, according to the modern geological theory, the last series of glaciations started only after the continents moved to more or less their current locations. This is because for glaciations to occur Antarctica has to be at the south pole and the Arctic ocean has to be landlocked (as it is now by North America and Eurasia).

There were other glaciations much earlier in the Earth history but they happened way before any of the current flora existed.

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I would agree with that. I think it was about 400 million years ago when East Antarctica was at the equator. I believe it was a desert. Although ferns, conifers and dinosaurs were there.

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Two decades ago I read a paper postulating that modern banana species (Musa a. and Musa b.) evolved in Burma about 2 million years ago.

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It turns out the author of the NPR article took a bit of liberty with the term “seedlings” – they are actually propagating these from “pups”; i.e. rhizome corm sprouts. So yes, the bananas are edible!

It is a cultivar of Gros Michael, produced by cryo-freezing a corm and then planting it in fertile soil to sprout. This method avoids damaging the corm during the freezing process.

The resulting cultivar is being grown in USDA zone 10b – hardly Kansas – but colder in comparison to tropical zone 12.

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they claimed that the banana’s properties was changed from the cryofreezing, and so it became cold hardier and the peel of the skin becomes more palatable compared to regular ones. If these are true, then there is an epigenetics going on that expresses the genes for the new behavior as a result of the cryofreezing. It would imply that subsequent pups should carry over the genetic expression without the need to cryofreeze them. Perhaps, they’re saying that they’ll have to cryofreeze each time for the new batch of banana plants in order to discourage competition. But I am betting that the subsequent pups should retain the characteristics of their mutated mother.

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There is lots of talk of cold hardy bananas coming to zone 5 ,6 & 7 growers soon! Here is the latest website article I found Hardy Banana Trees for Your Garden. It’s my opinion that gene splicing the inedible Musa basjoo with another edible banana will make bananas available everywhere eventually.