Growing bananas in north FL, 30 degrees N latitude

i don’t grow dwarf brazilian but i know dwarf brazilian is curved, has yellow flowers and takes much longer than namwah to mature. the green looks like brazilian, the yellow kinda looks like namwah. the yellow looks similar in size and shape to the commercially grown namwah. i can’t say for sure because i have to examine the entire plant - the stem, sheath, lining along the petiole, height, habit, leaf width, inflorescence, male flowers, bracts, rachis, etc. wait til the yellow ones turn deep yellow with a lot of black on them, that’s when namwah usually has the best flavor and the skin at that point should be very thin.

could be mislabelled and be cavendish, or could be kokopo, you’ll have to wait and see, sometimes tissue culture plants get mutations and they are not true to type

I think I’m done growing banana. They’re way too much work for very little return. I can buy 5 lbs of slightly over ripe banana in the store for 99 cents. They last me a week when kept in the fridge and taste good.

Today I harvested both bunches. The big one will become fertilizer. They go from green to mush in 24 hours. The little ones are much better with a bit of acid in the taste and ripen much more slowly. I’d keep that plant if I could grow them outside where space wasn’t an issue. In the greenhouse, probably not.

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Old photo but I have a few family members and know a few people growing bananas in western Washington state. Successfully might I add. However there are years that we don’t get them but they stay alive.

I remember someone didn’t believe me in here until i posted a photo. This is an east facing wall that only gets morning sun and shade starts around the afternoon.

I plan on growing them as well at my house outside of the greenhouse. I have 2 lost label varieties that have survived a full Colorado winter and spring outdoors in pots without protection because i thought they were dead. They’re sitting at the end of driveway along with a kohala longan plant that i also thought was a goner since i did the same to it but its only died back to the trunk and not to the graft! It’s coming back now!

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Like @fruitnut said I don’t find bananas to be worth it for me either. Too hard to protect with my minimal space so I will eventually purge them from my collection. I still plan to get one rack first at least, they could change my mind but I’d rather plant a Eugenia there and get berries every year, with less protection and fertilizer.

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I have one Ice Cream Banana, and, unless its amazing (taking into account I already don’t like bananas), it will be the only one I will ever have for eatting purposes. I am planning on trying to grow pink and Burmese Blue bananas from seed again, but they are ornamentals.

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I have a musa velutina now and I’m pretty excited about it. Mostly because the way it grows is super cool. Though I have heard that the fruit actually tastes pretty good. You just have the seeds to deal with. Maybe the fruit could be processed to remove the seeds and it might be good in banana bread or muffins.

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Even without fruiting, I’ve always admired them for being beautiful plants.

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same thought here. i have a dwarf cavendish that if i get bananas from thatd be cool but was never really counting on it. my others are more ornamental, Maurelii(Ensete ventricosum) and Zebrina(Musa acuminata). Siam Ruby is another i want to try as well. you can just blast them with water, nutes and sun and they love it. i had a row of musa basjoo in ground but they didnt make it through the winter with the huts i made them :cry: was a lot of work to have them freeze all the way through the corm.

i stuck a temp/humidity probe in with one of them over the duration:

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is that an ornamental variety? i’ve not seen a banana with that flower color.

i don’t like bananas either, since most of my life i’ve had store bought (grande nain/cavendish), but i have to say when i tried my home grown kokopo, i couldn’t believe how good it was. namwah is second, you have to wait til namwah gets mostly black and the skin is super thin and it has the best flavor. your “ice cream” banana is most likely standard sized namwah.

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i’ve never seen pink bananas but heard the fruits are tiny and mostly seeds.

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yeah, it looks like your winter is much colder than mine, perhaps try a truly tiny? those will grow and fruit in pots, and it’s much shorter than the super dwarf.

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@jamie

The ones i had were tasty when in Florida.

These are photos from the site listed

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No it’s edible. Tasted like the usual tiny Thai bananas we get at the grocery stores sometimes

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there’s a few types of red varieties (AAA subgroup), some with more purple skin, they seem to have a slight berry taste to them and are sweeter than cavendish, their growth cycle is too long so they are better suited for growing in south Florida

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i wonder what variety that is, do you grow them in the ground or in pots?

The ones in the photo are grown in ground.

Here’s a photo i took the other week of it.

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I have either namwah, kokopo, ice cream, or vient cohol in 2 pots that survived the freeze here. I’m planning on planting them in ground when i can get some help to pull them out of the pots lol. I thought they were dead so i left them out. They’re still growing but slowly.

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after looking at the two pictures you posted, and going through my musa manual that lists hundreds of edible bananas, i could not find any flowers that matched that, i am pretty sure that is not an edible variety but an ornamental one. ornamental varieties are either yellow or pink. i think you have basjoo. i have heard of people eating basjoo and other ornamental bananas, though, such as velutina. an edible banana would not grow that far north in the ground, outdoors and unprotected, not even the most cold hardy edible variety which is orinoco could survive there.

as for your potted varieties, i can identify namwah (ice cream) and kokopo once they are mature and have fruit, though i doubt you have veinte cohol as i know only a few collectors that grow it, if you bought it online, most likely it is tissue culture and not true to type, may be a different variety entirely, since i think the labs cannot culture it just like they have a problem tissue culturing blue java. i also wrote to Dr Fonsah a while back about veinte cohol who told me it is patented and whoever is selling it online would have to get permission. here is my correspondence with him:

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