my in ground banana plants - 4 kokopos and 2 namwahs are okay, still alive. still have green on the inner most leaves (all other leaves have been chopped off since the end of November in preparation for the first freeze in December).
one namwah has a flower/heart and that looks okay, just some cold burn at the edges, the flower/heart hasn’t dropped down to open to show fruit yet, thankfully.
the other namwah is fruiting, still in the early stages, all hands/clusters are in the horizontal position. now it has black spots which it’s had since winter, even though i covered it, there were just some nights this winter where i didn’t layer thick enough, so it’s been exposed to temps. in the upper 30s, though not yet freezing, this past week it got exposed to extended temps. in the 30s and possibly freezing on the coldest night so there’s more black spots, blackened ends and what i call wet spots, especially the lower hands. it is suffering from cold damage as well as a fungal issue since i see the black traveling from the flower/heart up the rachis and peduncle. i am going to watch and wait to see how much is affected before i cut off any hands. if and when that happens, i will try to ripen the hands indoors, and see if they are edible.
so far, trying to protect flowering/fruiting bananas from temps. below 40-45F has been the most challenging thing to do all winter. biggest lesson i learned, never ever let bananas flower late in the year. i’m better off chopping them down as mulch than protecting them the entire winter, which is what i did earlier in the season with my fruiting orinocos and puerto rican plantains.
my actual lows from 1/20 through 1/25 were colder than the reported lows from TWC (see calendar above). My lows were as follows, Monday 26F, Tuesday 25F, Wednesday 15F, Thursday 20F, Friday 23F, Saturday 23F. those covers were on for an entire week. not normal this cold for this long, so far this is the coldest i’ve experience in the panhandle.
Wow, Jamie!!! Looks like a lot of fast work on your part. What kind of covering are you using out there? As I write this we are on Anna Maria Island until this coming Saturday. Looking forward to being back home in Nashville to see about the citrus I have indoors and the open raised garden where we have garlic over-wintering.
i used whatever i had - burlap, landscape fabric, rug underlayment (thick felt), moving blankets and regular bed blankets, sheets, towels, frost cloth bags, cardboard, tarps, bubble wrap, plastic bags, etc. i spent two days wrapping 30 trees and insulating 4 greenhouses. and i had pop up tents and teepee tents that i built as well. i always anticipate for colder than what is forecast, i learned my lesson last year.
pics of some of the survivors, the citrus look the worst but that’s because they’re suffering right now from nutrient deficiencies and have been attacked by leaf miners most of the year
Here was my “tent city” last week (about 30 miles north of Houston). The tents are citrus trees covered with moving blankets then tarps on top. We dropped to 20 F for night low (after the snow had mostly melted off!). My bananas, Surinam cherry, starfruits, white Sapote, lemon and strawberry guavas, tropical guavas, papayas, etc. were unprotected and now look really bad. I did not cover any Satsumas, limequats, kumquats, Meyer lemons, Orlando tangelo, or Hamlin orange and they all (except Meyer has some defoliation) look fine.
oh no, so sorry, let us know how they do, sometimes damage can take a while to show up. as for your tropicals, bananas usually come back, and the cattley guavas and surinam cherry might come back, depending on how mature they are, probably not the rest though. citrus are pretty hardy and should all come back.
I have a small Suriname cherry I didn’t protect (had two in pots so was checking) it’s definitely likely dead. We will see if it comes back, but none of my citrus or avocados took any damage. You have proved to me I either need to increase my effort in protecting bananas or get rid of them. I’ll decide which this season. On my small footprint I’m leaning towards abandoning the bananas for something easier to protect and more productive. Maybe stick my cotrg or another potted citrus in those spots.
I have been abusing my in-ground tropical fruits with winter freezes for many years. They are all own-rooted, so usually come back. With hundreds of in-ground citrus trees to protect that are higher priority, my other freeze-sensitive fruits get neglected for lack of freeze-prep time. It does look like my white sapote only defoliated this time, rather than freezing completely to the ground. Some of my banana pups are already pushing a little growth, so the residual snow cover may have actually helped them avoid the 20 F air! My loquats should hold onto their fruitlets this year (they barely did last year with a 17 F low on two consecutive nights). I did cover my Jaboticaba with a moving blanket and tarp, and it is fine. The strawberry and lemon guavas I got covered (blankets and tarps) also look fine, the dozens of uncovered ones are very unhappy with me.
sounds like you have a lot to protect. i think i prioritize the other subtropicals over citrus because i know the citrus can come back, even when they totally defoliate. i am pretty sure i lost all my loquat fruits this winter. last year i only had 1 fruit, i think the coldest i got last winter was about 20F. i dug out my orinocos, a plantain and a super dwarf banana because i’m getting rid of them and their corms are still good and were protected from heavy mulching.
if you plant a short cycle type, you can get fruit within a year, the short cycles like heat so the ideal temps. for fruit development is about 85F or more (day and night) for the 1.5 to 2 months that they need to develop, otherwise it will take longer if your temps. are cooler. as long as you fertilize often, bananas can produce huge racks. they are the most high yielding fruit you can grow in a relatively short period of time.
My loquats last year were impossible to protect (circa 12’ in the air). The tree location (near SW corner of house) microclimate may have helped a little. This year a different (less-sheltered) loquat tree has fruit, so we will see.
I agree that bananas are quite a crap-shoot here (near Houston). Fruiting success for me invariably follows mild winters (minimum lows in upper 20s F) from larger pups that suffer minimum or no damage. I still have about 6 different banana cultivars in-ground, and get rewarded with nice racks of very tasty fruit from time to time. I do agree that Citrus are pretty tough compared with my other semitropical fruits, but my heart belongs to citrus (I have over 100 different cultivars, virtually all in-ground). I didn’t lose a single Citrus tree in February 2021 (low of 9 F), so they are obviously pretty special to me.
I find Papaya (Mexican) to be even more productive in SE Texas. I have a bunch of volunteer papaya plants that came up at the bases of Citrus trees around my orchard (from spreading compost from my huge compost bin). Some make it through our freezes and in their second or third year easily produce 50-100 pounds of fruit each. I started harvesting ripe fruit last October from just 3 “trees”:
I continued harvesting fruits every few days until January. In mid-January (just before the killer freeze) I harvested the largest of the nearly-ripe fruit from those 3 trees - over 180 pounds of it!
I gave away a bunch of it, and have been eating 1-2 papayas every day since. Here is what one of the (now multi-trunked due to repeated freezes knocking it back to a stump) plants looked like last fall:
You don’t use any supplemental heat on the citrus? Just plastic and a blanket over that? How low can the temp get for this system to prevebt defoliation of the hardier citrus like mandarins, kumquat, sudachi, etc…?
