The Incredible Growth of Banana Plants

I have always loved banana plants. Actually kept one alive in a pot in an apartment in Columbia, MO for a few years! For an apartment banana in a cold climate, a new leaf is rare and exciting (if you are into plants anyway).

Upon moving to California, I acquired some banana plants. For free, even, though that really shouldn’t come as much surprise to other Californians.

In a more favorable climate — like California — Bananas are incredibly fast growing plants. And they multiply rapidly. A well established banana tree will produce two or three new tree stalks per year.

Fast growth? No. Really. Fast growth.

A couple of weeks ago, I was cutting the dead leaves off of our bananas and accidentally sliced new leaf growth that was coiled up inside an old leaf.

The picture at left was taken less than 4 hours after the cut was made.

But that was just a small leaf. On a different plant, I cut down a rather large bit of the central trunk. At right is a picture of the new growth after about 4.5 hours.

Now, nearly two weeks later, the leaves are nearly a yard long and mostly unfurled.

Now that the banana trees are quite well established, I’m going to have to experiment with various recipes that call for wrapping the main ingredients with a banana leaf prior to cooking.

Unfortunately, bananas in California do not generally produce edible fruit. One of our banana trees did manage to actually bloom and set a hand of bananas, but they never matured. Bees, though, absolutely love banana blossoms.

Bananas are the single most global of all of the fruit crops. Interestingly, over 90% of all bananas sold are genetically identical (sad, too, because the best bananas I have ever had were all in the other 10%– unfortunately, they don’t ship well). As with any genetic monoculture, that means the world banana supply is vulnerable to catastrophic collapse due to disease.

And that is exactly what is happening now. You can expect that the current “universal banana” — the Cavendish — will effectively go extinct in the next decade or so, to be replaced by some new species.

This has actually happened before. The previous “universal banana” was the Gros Michel banana. It was pretty much wiped out by panama disease (banana root rot, effectively) in the early 1960’s, to be replaced by the Cavendish.

The claim is that the Gros Michel was a significantly sweeter banana and the Cavendish isn’t as good.

It will be interesting to see how the global notion of banana flavor will change next!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 12th, 2009 at 11:14 am and is filed under Life, Nature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.