Five years ago I swapped a sucker of my Ducasse bananas for a Blue Java sucker. I promptly put it in the ground and waited, and was disappointed, and waited, and was frustrated as detailed here.
I kept on waiting, however, and my patience has finally been rewarded – but only just. A trunk grew to a decent height, flowered and formed a fair-sized bunch which wasn’t taken by possums. Fortunately, it was close enough to maturity before the trunk collapsed a couple of weeks ago that the fruit ripened afterwards.
Its metre-tall sucker had died a few weeks earlier, and a small new sucker from that grew to about 30 cm and then died; not a success, then.
The Lady Finger suckers (from this long-established plantation) I have put into that patch have all died, too, whereas a couple of them I have put into pots are doing okay, so maybe the location is part of the problem. I will try again elsewhere with a chunk of the root.
The fruit are big! They are not as long a a Cavendish but they are so fat that one is more than enough for a snack. I suspect that the fatness is responsible for a peculiarity of the texture, i.e., the centre of the fruit is still quite firm when the outside is soft-ripe.
