BANANAS... AFTER 9 MONTHS HARVESTING PRUNING FEEDING PROPAGATING RECYCLING

My name is Charles Malki, biologist and plant expert with Ivory Organics, where we grow cool plants. And today we're going to be harvesting those ice cream bananas, also known as the blue java bananas today. In addition to harvesting the bananas, we're going to also take the mother plant down. Yes, once you harvest the bananas, the entire plant comes out as well to make room for its next sucker, which is this is the next giant sucker that got established late last year. And it's going to be taking the place of the original parent plant. Let me give you a quick recap of what it took to get to this stage before we harvest the bananas. So a lot of researchers and growers that are selling their trees say enjoy bananas within nine to 12 months of planting it. If it's a smaller banana variety, that may be true. But on average, it takes at least a year to a year and a half to get to enjoying the bananas that we've got behind us. And I'll explain to you why in just a moment. The banana plant behind me is the goldfinger variety, and then to my left is the apple variety and those beautiful tropical flowers that I've got behind that look like bananas are in fact haliconious to kind of add to the tropical look that we're doing here in the garden. Take a look at those beautiful red flowers behind me. When we installed this is of the bananas in our garden, the smallest being the goldfinger variety of bananas, this too will grow at least 10, 15 feet or so. So it'll also be a large banana variety as will the apple variety of banana that we've got. When we installed it, the first thing we did since we planted in the middle of summer is we sprayed it with the Ivory Organics 3-in-1 Plant Guard Spray, and if you come in a little closer and I'll share the label with you after, you can see that this one has probably had at least two if not three coats, more so for demonstration purposes. But this here you can see down below is still faded, and this was probably applied at least three if not six months ago, and it's still offering the plant protection from sunburn. And then these upper leaves do not have any protection at all as now the plant's established. But if we know that we're going to have a record heat wave that may damage the plant, we may then want to also reapply the Ivory Organics 3-in-1 Plant Guard where it's a ready to use spray on trunk branches and leaves, protection against damaging sunburn and insects and rodents. For newly installed plants and trees, for use under roses, fruit and nut trees, ornamental trees and shrubs. And what this product has in addition to offering the sunblock is it's got these seven natural oils, castor, cinnamon, clove, cedarwood, garlic, peppermint, rosemary, to also protect it from damaging insects that may harm the plant as well to get it off to a great start. So by applying the Ivory Organics 3-in-1 Plant Guard at the time of installation, that'll help minimize the sun stress and the heat stress to get your plants off to a great start at the time of transplant. That applies for your bananas as well as all your other fruit trees, ornamental trees, roses and shrubs. Another way to also purchase the product is by the can and this here is the Ivory Organics 3-in-1 Plant Guard, also registered material for use in organic agriculture, but this here you can actually add water to it and use it as a brush on as well as a foliar spray and also a tree paste. So when we installed the ice cream banana plant behind us, we started off with a plant a little bit smaller than even this one over here. The original parent plant, if we call it as being the original plant, the original parent plant was about this large. It grew about three to four feet in the first year, but then a sucker from alongside, which is over here, take a look at that little baby sucker plant over here, the sucker plant ended up coming with a lot more vigor and strength and took over the strength and the energy that the parent plant once had. So the sucker pup, or the pup also known, it could be a pup, a sucker or a daughter plant gained more vigor and took over the original parent plant. So then the parent plant was removed and the sucker was allowed to then grow. So that banana behind us, which is our first harvest of bananas off that plant, is actually the first sucker or the first pup that came from the original parent plant that was planted. And then over here you can see with the apple variety bananas, we removed all of those suckers around it a little while ago and you can see that we've now got a new sucker here and a new sucker over here. So between the two, I'm going to have to decide. This one over here is in the direction of the goldfinger banana. So we're probably going to remove this particular sucker out, but we'll leave this one as it's growing away from the other bananas in this area and the other plants. So we can steer the direction of where we want the future banana varieties to grow. And then over here to my left are all of the sucker pups that we took out just a few months ago. And you can see they're too big and competing with the actual parent plant, that's the reason we took them off. But you can see it also has the Ivory Organics 3-in-1 Plant Guard and then we cut the leaf in half to minimize the amount of desiccation from the plants as the roots were very minimal. But this here is some new plant growth since we transplanted them into the pots. This here is new plant growth as well. And this one here, new plant growth as well. So all of them are going to do well. And within the next month or two, we can transplant them into other gardens in the area. Again, it's important to also time which suckers you're going to want to keep. And my goal is to typically allow one sucker and some people prefer managing two to three suckers at a time. But most researchers will say one or two is permissible per year. So now that this plant is off to a great start, I can allow one of these suckers to now grow. That'll actually grow this year. Each one of these suckers will grow an average of another five to seven or eight feet. And then by next spring or summer, one of these suckers will then produce the fruit. This one over here, we're probably now we're at the first week of May. This plant also will hopefully go into bloom within the next hopefully 30 to 60 days. So that within the next 60 to 90 days, we'll be enjoying those fruit from the flower. Let's go back to our ice cream banana plant. So the banana, before it went into bloom, has grown 12 feet off the ground. So I'm at six feet and then from the six feet up, it was 12 feet off the ground before it created the bloom. And it created that bloom back in September, the first week of September. So before the banana can produce fruit, it's got to reach its maximum height. And it took this plant and it's now close approaching two years since it came out as a sucker out of the ground and is now holding fruit. So this has taken an especially long time. And the reason is, is that it went into bloom in September and it developed the fruit pretty quickly in September, October. And then that next 30 days that it needed to ripen, the temperatures, the average temperature, nighttime temperature started falling into the 50s and 40s and started approaching near freezing. The plant's metabolism in most bananas, once you enter the 50s, will typically stop its metabolism. All the leaves that you see behind me, all the leaves you actually even see on the sucker plant adjacent to it, which is producing plants, you'll notice that it only produced two leaves so far this year. So we're talking about January, February, March, April, and now we're in the first week of May and it's only created two new leaves up here, but on this plant that's supporting the fruit, there's no new leaves for this year. It's now starting to wake up from the winter dormancy and it'll now enter a state starting now, May, June, July, August, September, and October. During these months it'll grow so fast, put on so much height, and on average maybe put out a leaf every single week or two. So a lot faster growth starting now and it's that much more important that we're going to have to enrich the soil to make sure it's got all the energy to support all this new plant activity. Let's get to harvesting. So here we are in the cluster of bananas. The ice cream banana is also known as the blue java and the reason is the green bananas typically have a bluish hue to them. I don't know if you can capture that in the video or not, but take a look at those green bananas and we're going to now harvest one. I want to taste one before we harvest the whole thing while we're up here on the vine. So here we go. I've waited such a long time for this. Here we go. Let's open it together. Here we go. I definitely get why this is called the ice cream banana. You can definitely taste the vanilla in it. So cool. Let's now harvest the entire bunch. So we just had a couple of bananas and my wife had to try one as well and said it tastes as good as candy. We're so proud about these bananas and the flavor that it's going to offer ourselves and our children and our family and our neighbors. So a consideration to seriously consider the ice cream banana, also known as the blue java banana, into your home garden. What we're going to do now is harvest the banana and to do so we just need, you know, you can use a hacksaw or any other tool. They're pretty easy to cut into as you're going to see as we now remove the parent plant as well. We're just going to remove this like so. I thought I could support these bananas with just one hand. I just weighed them. It weighs a little over 60 pounds of bananas. Let's go and support them now in the structure behind us. Follow me. And here we go. I might want to put another tie into it to secure it. It's a lot of weight. But check these out. There's a few bananas I got damaged along the way just handling it. We're going to take those in first and start enjoying them. They recommend when storing your bananas to put them in a shady, cool place, preferably outdoors, to allow them to naturally ripen on its vine. Pretty impressive stuff, huh? Now that we've harvested the bananas, this parent plant, this parent banana plant is now exhausted. It will no longer produce leaves, it will no longer produce flowers, and absolutely no longer produce fruits. Therefore, we're going to remove the parent plant out and allow the other suckers to create the next generation of enjoyable fruit. To do so, all you need is your paper scissors to remove the leaves. And all of these leaves will be recycled back into the garden as well. Once we remove enough weight, we can then go with our hacksaw and start removing it in segments, being careful not to damage any of the plants below. I'm going to remove a lot more leaves and a lot more weight before I do so, just because I've got so many trees surrounding this area, so let me just keep on removing the weight. Now that we've removed the leaves, we're now going to take it down in sections. This here alone weighs at least 50 pounds, just this little piece, so I've got to be careful dropping this in the right place. Here we go. So we're going to continue this process until the end. I'll bring you back in just a minute. There we go. So I intentionally left this part above the ground for it to naturally dry out and naturally die back, rather than being under the ground and exposed to all of the possible pathogens and diseases that are naturally in the soil that can then possibly potentially enter this exposed area and then damage the other plants. So my goal is just to allow it to naturally air dry and die back on its own. Let's continue. So you can see we've created a lot of garden waste, but none of this will be wasted as you'll see by the end of this video. The next thing we do is clean up the remaining banana plants that are behind. Let's get back over there. I said earlier, most of this growth is all from last year. This is all last year's growth. It's the first week of May and all the plant has put out so far is the top one or two leaves and that's it. Whereas within the upcoming weeks, towards the end of May, June, July, August, September and October, it'll put out an average of one to two leaves per week. So most of the growth is going to be happening soon. We want to make sure we enrich the soil and get it ready for its next inflorescence, which is when it's going to bloom again and hopefully it's going to do so a lot sooner. If it can go into bloom by spring, we'll enjoy bananas by summer. But if it makes the same, I don't want to say mistake, but it wasn't ready to bloom until September last year on the last original parent plant, it didn't bloom until September. We didn't get to enjoy bananas until nine months later. So hopefully that's not going to be the case again. We're going to make sure we take care of this giant banana plant so it's right at the right height to go into bloom and hopefully it's going to do so pretty soon. To improve the look, we're going to remove all these dead branches next. Let's check out the height. I've now taken off all of the damaged and brown leaves from last year. The next thing we're going to do is now determine which sucker is going to be the one that we're going to allow to grow this year to produce next year's fruiting plant. So of those suckers, we've got a few to choose from. There's one over here that's growing towards the passion fruit vine. We've got this one over here, which is growing in the direction of the sprinkler. By the time either one of these two expand, it can actually damage our sprinkler that we've got here in this position, as it did last year. We've been scooting it back and the banana's been growing in this direction. So we've got to decide which direction we want the next plant to grow. We've got this perfect one on this side over here. We can move this leaf around. We've got this sucker over here, which is growing right adjacent to the last parent plant. This gives me a nice space away from the other sucker plant, which is going to produce our fruit. And then this one here will allow it to then grow. It'll also be robbing the energy from the root system of the parent that we just took out. And this one here will grow, I promise you, at least 10 feet this year alone. And hopefully we'll get to watch that growth together. So we're going to keep this, and I don't want to manage more than two plants at the same time in this growing zone. I know some people, as I said earlier, prefer growing two to three per zone. I only like doing one. I've got that one to produce the fruit for me this year and this one for next year. All the other ones are coming out. And the first thing I'm going to do is remove this sucker to create another ice cream banana variety that I can give to another family member or friend or try to find another spot in the garden. To do so, you can see that I've got some nice space here between the plant, the sucker or the pup and the parent plant. What we're going to do here is we're just going to go down with our shovel. And usually, I'm pretty careful about not going too close to the parent plant's roots. But this time, I'm not so concerned because we're not concerned about this parent plant. So we're going to get as much as we can of the root system for the sucker. So here we go. Let's see what we got. Let's go a little deeper. I'm going to pull back. I can hear the roots breaking. And let's see what we've got here. And here we go. Check out all of those roots. This is beautiful. This will make an excellent starter plant. And the benefit of this plant is we'll have now a genetically identical plant, genetically identical tasting, identically growing plant by growing this clone off of the parent plant. So now we've just created some more ice cream banana plants by doing this process. I'm going to put this in a spot on the side to replant in a pot after this video. So let me put this in a safe zone. So what we created, we're now going to backfill that back in with some more soil and some more compost that I have here in the bucket. So we're just going to backfill that. I'm going to mix it in with some quality compost as well. And we're going to patch that hole that we just created. Take a look at all of those air roots. These are very important. That's the reason I don't like disturbing the roots at the top. But these are all air roots, which are very important and responsible for bringing in oxygen and air from the outside, including nitrogen, as well as also absorbing the water that's near the surface and the minerals that are near the surface as well. So I'm usually very careful to not disturb the roots at the very top. And instead when fertilizing to make sure that we're doing it in layers upon the surface soil, which we're going to demonstrate towards the end of this video, I'm going to disturb some of you, but this one over here is just coming out. We're not going to transplant it as, take a look at how close it is to the parent plant. If I were to try to remove it with some roots, I would risk damaging some of the roots to this plant. And at this time of the year and before the plant has gone into bloom and fruit, it may be okay to do so, but I don't need any more banana plants. I've already got a surplus of bananas that I've created and I know I'm going to have some more suckers throughout the year. So I'm actually just going to saw it out by getting as close as I can to the base, right above the soil level. Like I said, I like pruning it so it dries with the air rather than rotting below ground level. So we've done that with this sucker, which again, we're going to recycle into our compost piles. And then I've got another sucker here behind me. If you want to come around this way, I can prune it from the other side, but if you take a look right in here, you can see it looks like it's coming right out of the parent's base. It's not really coming out of the ground. I'm sure if I splice it, I can probably get some roots, but again, it's not worth the effort and the risk of damaging the parent plant. So I'm just going to saw that out like so. That one's out. And we'll do the last one here as well. Here's the third sucker. There we go. You may notice behind that I've got all these plants that I'm recycling as well. I've always thrown a lot of extra parts back here and I'm going to do a lot more towards the end. I'll show you in just a minute. So now that we've prepared our banana plant for another year of growing success, it's important to feed your banana plants and I like to feed my banana plants every single month throughout the entire growing season. Meaning from now, May, June, July, August, September, October, I'll start slowing down and really do nothing over the winter as the plant typically goes into hibernation and dormancy. Even though it's still green, it's not really doing much. But during the growing season, it's important to continue feeding your plant and whatever the recommended dose is, I like to cut it back in about 50%. As it's still, if you're doing things organically, there's a lot of things naturally happening in your garden and we're going to be adding other things from the garden around the plant as well to be adding more elements from the periodic table to result in successfully growing our bananas as well as other fruit trees that we have here in the garden. I've got here a few examples of fertilizers we can use to fertilize our plant. The first one, here made by Espoma, says, what does it say over here, it says urban vegetable food. So it doesn't even say banana food, but this is what I'm drawn to when selecting this as a fertilizer, is that it says 3-4-4, which is 3% nitrogen, 4% phosphorus, and 4% potassium. Plants need, banana plants in particular, need as large as possible, less number, more so than the other numbers, but they do need a lot of nitrogen, they do need a lot of phosphorus, but even more potassium. So I'm looking at fertilizers that are high in potassium, so here's Dr. Earth, a 3-9-4, so very high in phosphorus, which is important towards fruit production as phosphorus is used in the fruits, the flowers, as well as the plant, but I want, again, more potassium, which is that last number. So this may be a product I use in conjunction with other organic fertilizers, and then even Miracle-Gro makes some organic products as well, and if you take a look over here, I'm using, it says organic bone meal, and with this, it says your NPK, 6% nitrogen, 8% phosphorus, and 0 on the potassium, and we just said the potassium is one of the most important numbers, and this one being a 0, again, I would not use by itself if we're going to end up using a product like this. This is probably the least choice, only because we need more potassium in the soil as well. And then there's liquid fertilizers as well, which we could use, such as this one here, a fish and kelp fertilizer with NPK of 2-2-2, so it's a balanced fertilizer, and then we've got this fish fertilizer over here made by Alaska, which is a 5-1-1, more nitrogen, but very low on the phosphorus and potassium, so again, not the best choice. This one here would be the superior liquid feed to be considering. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to use this granular fertilizer around my banana plants, I'm just going to scatter, like I said, whatever the recommended dose is and read the directions, I'm just going to sprinkle some of this granular mix around the banana plant, and then this will offer feed over at least two to three months as the granules break down. So let's scatter this around the plant. So we've just added that all around the root ball, what we're now going to do is I'm going to take some of the fish and kelp fertilizer, and I'm going to put this in my bucket of water as well, and we're going to make a feed using this too. Before we add this, I'm now going to add also a layer of compost around the plant, so let's do that next. I've got here some compost as well that we're going to put around the plant. One that I've actually purchased, as you can see here, and the second one is my homemade one, and you can see in here that it's got a lot of life in it. The stuff that you buy does not have earthworms and it doesn't have the bacteria and the fungus and the beneficial nematodes and stuff, but you can see there's a lot of life crawling in here. So what I'm going to do next is I'm just going to add the compost around the root zone, so we'll just sprinkle some like that, and then you may have noticed that a lot of these branches have not quite broken down, no big deal, we're not mixing it down into the soil, we're keeping it near the top soil where it's going to continue to break down and it's not going to rob the soil of nitrogen, instead it's going to naturally break down and continuously feed those elements back into the root zone. I'm next carefully just going to take my hand tool and mix these ingredients into the surface soil, next we're going to take our wood chips and scatter those around, and what the wood chips will do is it will help retain moisture, it'll also add additional elements to the soil as the wood chips naturally break down into the soil as well, and so it's going to retain moisture, it's going to add and enrich elements, it's going to also help toward preventing a disease known as root rot, what these wood chips will do is help encourage additional beneficial microorganisms in the soil that will then compete with those like Phytophthora diseases that can lead to and contribute to root rot, and there's a lot of research that goes toward studying that, but make sure when you add your wood chips that you stay away from the tree, the banana plant trunk, so what we'll do is when we add it is just scoot those wood chips to just be in the root zone, but not necessarily lie against the banana trunk as that can lead to another phenomenon known as stem rot, so make sure you keep those wood chips away. Add our kelp meal, which is a balanced 2-2-2 to the entire root zone as well, this will make the elements immediately readable to the plant roots. Leaf matter that we've created, we're going to now use that also to continue mulching around the banana plant, and we can simply cut it down into pieces like so, and these will dry out over the next couple of months, these larger stems will also be beautiful fuel for those slugs and snails in your garden that will eat it and recycle it into manure that will go right back in your soil, so I'm throwing those towards the back wall, and that's the circle of life, check this out, I just added maybe about 10 leaves and I'm going to continue the process, what I've just done is I'm going to be rejuvenating all of these leaves and all of the minerals and all of the elements that went into creating these leaves and these plants by returning them right back into the soil to then benefit the next generation, pretty cool stuff, I didn't expect to recycle the entire parent plant, but I managed to fit it all in, check this out, the entire parent plant, all of the leaves and all of the stock is all in here, and all of this will be recycled again by the snails and the slugs and the earthworms that will come up and consume this and recycle all of those elements and nutrients back into the soil to benefit the now graduated sucker which is now the parent, so this sucker is now taking the place of the parent plant, so by definition this will now become the parent banana plant, and this one here will be the sucker that will grow the remainder of this year to 10 plus feet so that by next year it will be in a position to bloom and produce fruit. The last and equally important step, soak your banana plants, you've got to water them very thoroughly, especially after fertilization. If you found this video informative, be sure to like it and most importantly by subscribing below, you'll be connected to all these other educational gardening videos by Ivory Organics, thanks again for watching and happy gardening. More videos at www.plastics-car.com