Banana Field Trip…
I went up to my Uncle’s banana farm today, I asked the guys there if they could teach me some stuff that I might be doing wrong.
The first thing I wanted to learn was proper sucker prunning as well as their method of transplantation. I had some area recently cleared for expansion, the downside was that I didn’t want to spare anymore cash to buy seedlings. I know that you could just get from the available suckers surrounding the mother plant so as to save on costs.
The picture on the left is a properly prunned sucker. After removal from the mother plant the roots and the tip is chopped off leaving a ball (right picture). They said this is to induce growth as well as deeper root penetration on the sucker once it’s planted. The cutting off of the roots I can understand since this forces the plant to go on building mode, the top part still confuses me though. From what I’ve observed though, it seems to grow faster once you chop the top off.
They also taught me fruit bagging. After all the hands have grown, the heart of the banana is cut then the excess growth points on the tip of the fruit are removed. Even in the false hands the black and white tips are removed to give a clean all green look. Some pesticide is then sprayed on the fruit so as to prevent insects from swarming them, causing scarring (black spots) which will reduce the quality of the banana. The blue plastic bag then goes on as well as a color coded ribbon which will specifiy when it is due to harvest. This will be useful when compiling the bagging report so that you can see how much is harvestable.
I also asked them about their experience with the bunchy top virus (top picture) which could be carried by the aphids. They said that their bunchy top occurs whenever they chop some foilage around the area. Which made me realize that that was probably why the aphids made a home out of my bananas. The bunchy top virus is characterized by clumped leaves and stunted growth. There are some cases where in it gets infected during its fruit bearing stage, this results in growth stoppage for the fruit (picture below).
A very fruitful day I have to say (no pun intended, *snicker*)
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