Growing Bananas at Home

Growing banana plants at home is a much more promising undertaking than getting those plants to provide fruits. While growing banana plants at home can be a challenge, especially for fruit production, it’s a rewarding endeavor that adds beauty and greenery to any garden. However, there are orchestrated micro-climates, cold-hardy species, and alternative techniques that can have temperate climate gardens occasionally provide bananas. More so, growing banana plants—bananas or not—is a worthwhile undertaking.

And, with that mindset, we can begin our exploration of growing bananas at home, just about wherever home may be. If the goal is to produce bananas, then it will require some persistence and experimentation. If the goal is to get the plants to grow, then success is almost guaranteed. If the goal is to produce bananas in the USA like those found in the supermarket, odds are it’ll require a subtropical state like Hawaii or Florida.

That’s only to ground us in reality. It’s not to say we shouldn’t try.

The Banana Plant

Bananas, belonging to the Musa genus, are not trees but rather gigantic herbs that thrive in warm, humid conditions. Their “trunks” aren’t trunks but pseudo-stems, more like a collection of leaves wrapped around each other. Their actual stems are rhizomes, underground stems, which send fast-growing shoots up to give us what we recognize as banana “trees”.

In reality, these trees only grow long enough to flower and fruit then die to make way for the next shoots. Normally, that progression takes less than a year. That said, they do get very large, some over 30 feet tall, and they produce a tremendous amount of biomass, not to mention fruit. One tree can easily provide 50 pounds of bananas.

Source: Irina UA/Flickr

Growing Bananas

Bananas can’t be grown from seed; rather, they are grown from a piece of rhizome taken from the source of the bananas. Other plants with rhizomes, such as ginger and turmeric, are propagated the same way. These types of plants are typically very easy to start because they behave like root-propagated weeds such as dandelions, comfrey, and horseradish. In the right conditions, a piece planted is more than likely to grow anew.

However, productive banana plants prefer a temperature range between 75-85 degrees and a humidity level of at least 50%. They need that consistently for most of the year in order to produce well. They need that consistently for most of the year in order to produce well. To flourish and produce, banana plants generally prefer a temperature range of 75-85 degrees Fahrenheit and humidity levels above 50%. They also want plenty of water. The plants, though, can be grown almost entirely throughout the contiguous United States and enjoyed for a few months of the year. In most places, any hope of production will require concerted effort.

Going Bananas

The challenge for producing bananas in cold weather is having the fruit mature in time. In colder regions, creating a micro-climate can help extend the growing season for banana plants. Certain places in the US, such as southern Louisiana, southern Texas, and southern California can have a long enough season, but beyond that, the situation is tougher. It takes five or six months of growth before bananas appear and another three months for them to mature. And, that’s when the days have twelve hours of sunlight and plenty of warmth as in the tropics. What’s more likely to happen in the US is that the bananas will appear in the summer, and the plant won’t make it long enough for them to mature.

Some people take the unripe bananas and put them in a plastic bag with apples to get them to go yellow. However, the sweetness won’t have arrived, and the bananas will be bland (kind of the way artificially ripened tomatoes aren’t as good as ones from the garden). Green banana burgers, made by grating green bananas and mixing that with onions and whatnot, are very good, and the unripe bananas can be used in many other recipes.

Another good possibility for the banana plant as food is using the banana leaves for steaming stuff or wrapping homemade tamales. While fruit production may be limited, banana plants offer other benefits such as edible leaves and biomass for compost.

Source: Mysserli/Flickr

For the Hopeful

All that said, some people manage to get a bunch of bananas now and again by adjusting the micro-climate, choosing the right species, and taking protective measures. Implementing strategies like mulching and sheltering can greatly enhance the success of growing bananas in less-than-ideal climates.

• If banana plants are sheltered on the northern side and open to the south (sun-facing) side, they’ll be warmer sooner and stay warmer
• They should be heavily mulched in the winter, even up to a cubic yard of hay over them, to keep them snuggly and possibly make them sprout sooner.
• Dumping gray water in the banana patch can help to keep them well hydrated.
• Cold-hardy varieties include a cavendish (Musa acuminata) banana cultivar called blue java or ice cream, a Japanese variety called Basjoo (Musa ‘basjoo’), or Himalayan Sikkim bananas (Musa sikkimensis), the last of which is edible but not prize-winning.
• Rhizomes can also be started early, in the warmth of indoors, and put out when the weather is warm enough.
• And, in the autumn, some people have built protective shelters over the bananas to extend the growing season on that end.

Suffice it to say, we won’t soon be producing bananas commercially in the continental US, but it can be a fun experiment for adventurous gardeners here. Despite the challenges, growing bananas can be a fun and educational experience for home gardeners. And, at least the plant will provide useful stuff like beauty, mulch material, biomass, and other edible parts if the bananas don’t work.