Tag: banana varieties

Dwarf bananas reverting to tall type

Can dwarf bananas revert to the tall variety? It seems to have happened with a backyard banana patch I help to look after.

When my friend bought the house four years ago it had a well-cared-for circle of Dwarf Ducasse but he allowed it to escape at one side so that it is now a Q with a very long tail. The plants in that tail are all much taller and trunks are not quite so fat, but the fruit are still Ducasse.

Every plant in the tail is tall. There are no in-between plants, and the suckers can be distinguished when they are only knee-high. Dwarf suckers have fatter trunks and more leaves (and the leaves turn out more) than the ‘tall’ suckers.

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Taste-testing Australia’s wild bananas

A while ago I wrote about Australia’s native bananas, Musa banksii, and said that, “Sometime I will find a bunch of wild bananas ripe enough to try eating one,” adding that, “my expectations [of their edibility] are not high.”

Some things take longer than we expect. This one took eight and a half years.

I have, at long last, achieved my aim – not by finding a bunch in the wild, in fact, but by having some fruit given to me via our local Landcare Bush Garden Nursery. Even then, the nursery didn’t grow them but acquired a bunch through their professional network.

There is no need to repeat what I said in 2014 about where the plants are found in the wild, or their evolutionary history. Let’s move straight on to the fruit as they reached me.

Wild bananas Musa banksii
Four wild bananas – captive at last!

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Backyard bananas – an update

Anyone searching Green Path for “banana” will get a lot of results but none which give any sense of what has been happening in my garden recently. A reader sent me a compliment, a request and an offer (all in one email), so I thought I could reply here, via a general update on my backyard banana growing.

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Blue Java bananas come to fruition at last

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. Continue reading “Blue Java bananas come to fruition at last”

Ducasse banana seed – an exceptionally rare find

As most of us know, all of our cultivated bananas are sterile clones and those little black dots in the middle of the fruit are immature seeds which will never develop. Getting a real seed out of a cultivated banana is a really rare event, as we realise immediately when we think about how many bananas we have eaten and how few seeds we have found.

I have been growing Ducasse (sugar) bananas in my back yard for twenty-odd years, occasionally with other varieties, and I hadn’t come across a mature seed in all those years until six weeks ago when I found one seed in each of two bananas from the same bunch. One seed crunched between my teeth but I managed to save the other – roundish, blackish and about 4mm long. Continue reading “Ducasse banana seed – an exceptionally rare find”