My wife and I went to the field today to view the very first instance of a banana fruit in our crops. Pretty nifty considering that it was targetted to start budding come March. Looking at the size of it, it was about 1 week out already.

Proper nutrition and water supply were the key.

I had breakfast with an uncle this morning and our discussion turned to foliar fertilization. My experience in foliar fertilization is not as extensive as him since I just started in farming. Foliar is touted to give that last mile of growth spurt as well as give a surgical method of controlling a plants nutrition. Which is quite important as a plant’s health is very big factor in it’s resistance against diseases.

He was talking shop with my dad in the early 90’s when my dad was conceptualizing and experimenting with his formula. Talking to him gave me fresh insight as to what my Dad’s notes meant (weird, trying to understand a dead man’s notebook, it’s like something out of archeology.)

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It could be your last… I found this article dated June 2005 via Google in Popsci. I don’t know however what the relevance of this is now, 7 months later.

I’m not so familiar with the Panama Disease as most bananas now are resistant to that type of fungus. This fungus was so deadly, that it eradicated the common banana found in American households, the Gros Michel variety. Which was replaced by the Cavendish variety which was resistant to the Panama Disease. The fungus climbs up the roots and passages of the plant and produces a gel like substance which gums up the plant and blocks water and nutrients from circulating.

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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.

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