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.
The first clue this is bogus information: The author refers to bananas as “Trees”.
Musa genetics experts will tell you that the property that makes Basjoo cold hardy is also what makes the fruit inedible: lower water density.
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The challenges are:
- Shorter growing season. For example, in the tropics (lat. 10 or less) bananas fruit in 6-9 months depending on cultivar. But in my climate, even though I grow them outdoors year-round they take 18 months from “pup” to harvest because we do not sustain tropical temperatures long enough.
- Less intense sunlight at higher latitudes.
- Good fruit quality appears to be dependent on higher water density in the plant which is a non-starter in places with sustained freezes.
- The public perception it is a “tree”. Instead it is a tropical bulb. The “trunk” is a pseudo-stem formed by leaf stalks.The edible seedless hybrids (both naturally occurring and human-made) propagate underground from rhizomes, which produce more bulbs.
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Richard nails it. Talk of edible cold hardy bananas is a pipe dream. They are barely viable here (9B) with months of sustained >85f temps with rare, mild frosts.
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I have some growing in 8b n. Florida! They have taken the high teens without freezing to the ground. I don’t know the variety as they came from my fathers house 40 years ago!
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Have they also fruited for you? Are they seedless? Tasty?
My mother lives near you (Live Oak area) and she would be VERY interested in any pups you might be willing to share, as she’s been working on getting a collection of fruit trees and plants for her new land there and specifically asked if I knew of any bananas likely to survive there. I said no, but I’d love to be able to tell her otherwise.
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Yes they fruit every year! They are small but very sweet and creamy! I’m in lake city and would gladly share!
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BTW they are seedless
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Great! I sent a PM.
Did you see this part, too though?
I can speak from experience, having lived in Gainesville for 4 years and my mother living in areas around there for decades, off and on, that most winters there have at least one or two brief cold snaps to the low 20s or below. I don’t know of many dessert bananas that can handle that without freezing to the ground, so these must be on the hardier end of the spectrum for sure. I doubt they could handle a Seattle winter (though I might be tempted if it performs well for my mother), but it sounds like a banana that could at least easily handle most areas in zone 9a, and some in 8b like north FL where there’s rarely a long duration of cold.
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Throw in some CRISPR and this might be a usable, worthwhile banana.
I would just like one that will set fruit in a pot, to start with
Everytime I see one of these claims I check the weather station data. And yes, it turns out that they endured temperatures below 32°F down to 25°F for 9 hours, and several years ago down to 18°F for 2 hours within a 10 hour stretch below 32°F. The rest of the year though was rarely below 40°F and never below 35°F. Several standard cultivars will tolerate this e.g. Namwa, Pisang Ceylon. Definitely not Gros Michael.
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Musa velutina fruits yearly in zone 7b coming back from complete dieback. The flesh is edible but it’s full of seeds. Wonder if using gene technology the seeds can be removed
Who is this guy Gene anyway LOL!
There is a well-funded industry that wants to do this. The requirements for seedless are known. What’s remaining are several studies of whole-genome sequences + what are called SNP studies of specimens with true cold-hardy traits. From there, one can proceed with in-vitro hybrids. In the meantime, the corporate status-quo is making a lot of money with very little effort.
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We do have very mild winters here! We really don’t have a winter. We have a week of 70 and 80f and then 1 or 2 nights of hard freeze and 5 or 6 frost! But my bananas do survive the hard freezes. Also Melrose is in the middle of the city. I live about 10 miles north of town out in the country!
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The process for producing seedless bananas is well known. Musa with 3x sets of chromosomes are seedless. produce a 4x plant by exposing the mother to Colchicine or a less toxic modern option and breed that plant back to a 2x plant to produce 3x seeds that will be seedless.
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