In the Garden with Kerry Heafner

“Food, glorious food.  Corn, ‘maters, and okrey!”  The correct lyric is “Food, glorious food.  Hot sausage and mustard” from the musical Oliver!  I made up my own lyrics many years ago, the summer of 1988 to be exact, when our community theatre group back home performed a summertime production of Lionel Bart’s classic.  Ever hear a bunch of people from rural southcentral North Carolina try to speak and sing in a British dialect?  It was hilarious.  Those of us down in the orchestra pit were wheeze laughing.  The next summer, they did The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.  That was hilarious too but for reasons we won’t get into here.

By all accounts glorious food from ArkLaMiss gardens has been abundant this season.  Corn, tomatoes, and okra have been and are being harvested in droves this season.  And, we still have some hot weather to go, so okra, eggplants, purplehull/field peas, and watermelons are still fair game for the taking.  By now, fall tomatoes started from seeds should be up and running, and cool-season crops should be germinating now for transplanting either later this month or in early September.  A late crop of green beans is even possible at this time of year, too.   

As far as fruit is concerned, yours truly is experimenting with dwarf bananas and let me share with you what I’ve learned so far.  First, bananas are in the tropical genus Musa and they are among the largest herbaceous plants on Earth.  They’re basically weeds in their native habitats which include stream banks and low areas with highly organic soil.  They grow and spread like wildfire when they have rich soil and lots of water.  They’re native to most of the southwestern Pacific Rim and have been introduced to other tropical and semi-tropical areas around the globe.  Banana plants are erroneously called “trees;” they’re not true trees at all.  Botanically, bananas are monocots that grow from an underground stem called a corm, similar to Gladiolus, and have leaves and a pseudostem that emerge in a pattern remarkably similar to that of grasses; the “trunk” is formed by leaf sheaths wrapping around each other.  When the corm and pseudostem have harnessed enough energy, a flag leaf emerges that signals flower production.  One pseudostem produces one large flower peduncle that first has many female flowers (each flower ovary looks like a tiny banana).  Large, edible reddish or purple bracts surround the flowers and eventually fall off after pollination.  Male flowers, which produce pollen, are produced distally on the elongated flowering stem.  Once a rack of bananas has formed, the distal end of the flower stalk can be cut away.  Fruit can ripen either on the plant, or the entire rack can be removed from the plant and hung somewhere cool and dry while fruit ripens.  Bananas will, of course, turn some shade of yellow when fully ripe.  There are varieties that finish with a pinkish or greenish-blue hue.    

My interest in trying to grow a variety of banana here in northern Louisiana isn’t a question of them being hardy in our USDA Hardiness Zone 8b; they aren’t.  We’re simply too far north of the Tropics for them to survive winter without help.  Typically, they die back to the ground and the corm can be protected with a thick layer of mulch, and they reemerge the next season.  However, if producing fruit is the goal, then protecting the above ground portion of the plant will require winter accommodation for it and I have no idea what that will look like yet.  I’ve been wanting to try bananas since October 2019, when we discovered banana plants with ripe fruit near Antique Alley in West Monroe.  The property owner didn’t recall the variety name, but we tentatively identified it as Orinoco or Burro Banana.  The bananas were short and distinctly trigonal compared to the longer, more cylindrical Cavendish Bananas in the grocery store.  And they were much sweeter than grocery store bananas.  I was afraid they would taste awful, but I was pleasantly surprised.  I should have asked the property owner for a pup then.  But we were headed into fall, and I wasn’t sure it would survive the winter.  Fast forward to the fall of 2024.  After searching online, I was super excited to find a Dwarf Orinoco Banana for sale at a nursery in Florida so I ordered it…just in time for winter.  It had to overwinter in my sunroom with eighteen pineapple plants.  By the time the weather permitted putting it outdoors back in May, it looked worse for wear.  I’m amazed when anything I try works, and it looks like this banana plant is off to a great start.       

Bananas like a super-rich soil with lots of compost and nitrogen, and they don’t mind being watered multiple times a week.  No problem here.  If you know me, then you know I’m an inveterate composter and backyard composting is a soap box topic of mine.  If you don’t have a compost pile in the back yard, you should have one!  You’ll be amazed at how much household waste will stay out of the landfill and be converted into the single best soil amendment gardeners can ask for. (See? It doesn’t take much to get me started!)

I started my trip down this road by digging a wide planting hole and making it deeper than I normally would for any other type of fruit tree.  I put a two five-gallon buckets full of hot manure in the bottom of the hole, then covered that with two more buckets of finished compost.  The plant was set at ground level into the hole, and the hole was backfilled with soil further amended with compost.  A layer of partially composted grass clippings was put down next.  Between the manure at the bottom of the hole and the grass clippings, there’s no shortage of available nitrogen!  A thick layer of hay as a mulch topped off the planting, and I just recently refreshed it with new hay.  Bananas are heavy feeders and don’t seem to mind an occasional dose of water-soluble 20-20-20 fertilizer.  Frequent rains this summer have kept it watered, but I supplement a couple times per week between rain events.  As I write this, the plant has a dozen leaves and has produced two “pups” or vegetative offshoots.  These can be divided off the corm for new plants.  I think I’ve created a good microhabitat for it in my yard.  I’ve situated the plant on the west-facing side of the house, so it gets morning shade then full-on afternoon sun.  I’m hoping heat reflected off the brick wall will provide extra warmth in winter.    

Now, why am I fooling with tropical and semi-tropical fruit? I don’t know, really.  I’m just trying to see if I can get a banana plant to overwinter and produce edible fruit in our area.  I love a good challenge.  This could get interesting so stay tuned.