Just Bury Bananas in the Garden and This Happens

What's going on growers? It's James Figgioni coming to you live from Jersey. Today me and Tuck are going to show you what happened when we buried a banana underneath a tomato plant and let you know if it's worth it or not. Let's go! Earlier this spring on May 22nd, me and Tuck decided that we wanted to try and bury a banana underneath a tomato plant to see if it would help encourage larger yields and also to see if it would help disease resistance late in the season. We figured we'd try a banana because bananas are high in potassium and we know that potassium plays a crucial role in fruit development, in disease resistance and in overall plant health. The first thing we did was we pulled back our wood chip mulch and dug a hole with a spade about twice the size of the pot from the tomato plant that we're going to be putting in the ground. Then we grabbed a tomato plant. We decided that the super sweet 100 would be a good choice because I already planted a number of super sweet 100s in different locations in the garden. Next we grabbed two bananas that were starting to get a bit overripe and I didn't feel like using these bananas for banana bread so I thought this might be a good way to use them to try to get the potassium out of to help our plants. I grabbed the bananas, I broke them into a few pieces and I put them at the bottom of the hole in hopes that as the season progresses they would break down and provide a good level of potassium for the plants that hopefully really helps them late in the season. Then I covered the bananas with a couple inches of soil so the roots would have a bit of soil to root into before they got to the bananas. After that I took my tomato out of the container and put some mycos on it to inoculate it with the mycorrhizal fungi. Next I backfilled the hole with soil about halfway. I used natural soil and then I watered it in. After that I added some more natural soil and then watered it in again. I made sure to only use the natural soil because I want to see the kind of effect that the banana would actually have on its own. Lastly I pulled the wood chip mulch around the plants and stuck my tag in. After that there's not much else I did besides staking the plant and I pruned it and I also sprayed it with neem oil spray one time because I saw a few aphids on the leaves. A little over a month later on June 26th the plant was showing a lot of growth and looking super healthy. About a month after that on July 20th the plant was loaded with fruit that was starting to ripen and the stems were super super thick and looking really healthy. Ten days later by July 30th the first tomatoes were ripening and I began grabbing regular harvests from the plant. It's September now and here is the tomato plant that me and Tuck buried the banana underneath. Look how well it's still growing and look at the high level of production. Really happy with the way it came out and me and Tuck thought it would be a decent idea because not only do we have some extra bananas that were like a bit overripe but also we figured that potassium is so important for overall health of tomatoes and it works really well to help with disease resistance. So we figured we'd bury that banana over time it would decompose in the ground maybe some of the worms would do some work too and then that potassium would be bioavailable for the plants to be able to take up as it got later into the season and be able to help it to grow deeper into the fall. I think it came out pretty well. One thing to note is that this is super sweet 100 so this is a relatively disease resistant variety so I'm not saying that adding some potassium or like putting a banana underneath your plant is going to make your plants completely disease resistant. I'm just saying that we thought it was a cool idea and we think it helped a little bit. Here's some of the tomatoes let's grab one to actually get a taste of it see if it tastes like bananas. Just kidding. Absolutely delicious one of my favorite all-time varieties and like I mentioned earlier we planted a number of super sweet 100s throughout the garden that's one of the reasons I chose to put this plant into the ground. So right next to us here this is another super sweet 100 that I didn't put the banana underneath. You can see it isn't doing necessarily as well as the one I put the banana underneath but I'm not saying that the banana is the reason for that. One thing is for for whatever reason it seems like this this super sweet 100 it like uh it just wasn't as good of seed it wasn't as good of like a phenotype as the other one. I can even tell how the color the color on the all these tomatoes was a little like light at the top so even though this was the same variety it didn't do as good as this one. Let me bring you over to another spot too where there's another super sweet 100 right in this trellis here. So here's another super sweet 100 right here and this one isn't doing as good as the one with the banana underneath it but some of this could attribute to the fact that I have so many tomatoes close together so they're not having they don't have as much space and they don't have as much room for the roots to be able to have as much water. When I grow tomato plants like this up a stake not only do the plants have more space which allows for better airflow and gives less chance of disease but also the roots have more space and have less competition for water. So when I even dig down here some of this soil is still relatively moist not having watered it when some of this soil in the in the trellis bed is it's a lot drier because I haven't really watered that either recently. So when I grow tomatoes like this I actually get a smaller overall yield per square foot because I only have about one plant in a three square foot section or a three foot section while in the trellis bed I grow three plants in three square feet. So that allows me to get a higher overall yield even though it's a lower yield per plant. Right here though you can see this plant is doing really nice late into the season. I can't say it's 100% because of the banana and I'm not naive enough to think that a banana can provide a complete level of nutrition. I know you need nitrogen phosphorus and potassium just as like the base things and the banana is mostly just going to provide potassium but I think it did help as like a slow release level of potassium to allow this plant to excel late in the season to continue to produce and I mean you can see how thick some of the stems are. I mean I've got thick stems other places too but the stems look really healthy except for some of the tomatoes that kind of went bad and and dripped on the on the stem but the plant looks really nice. The only thing is this probably isn't the healthiest looking tomato plant even the super sweet 100 plant in the whole backyard. There's the plant in the back that I have that's even healthier. Another thing I need to mention is I live in New Jersey. My soil is pretty good for growing tomatoes. It's actually really good. I showed you I didn't put anything in the ground. I didn't add any fertilizer or anything. All I added was that mycorrhizal inoculant which doesn't have any nutrition or anything. It's just to add to help develop the mycorrhizal association. So overall there's no way the banana hurt at all. If you have extra bananas I suggest trying to bury them under a tomato plant. See if it works for you but I wouldn't just like go out and buy bananas to bury them under the plant. You can add potassium in different forms like an all-purpose fertilizer or even just a fertilizer with a higher level of potassium and just makes you top dress later into the season. But I think it was way better than wasting the bananas. So let me take you back to the super sweet 100 plant that's doing even better than this. I think it is and we'll take a look at it real quick. Right here is the super sweet 100 that's the most productive on the whole property. Look how much fruit it has on it and how big it is and bushy. This one just had a different level of production. One thing I noticed though is a lot of the leaves even the new growth look like they have some issues in them. So maybe the banana did help because the other plant had some nice dark green new growth. This probably could have used some top dressing later in the season. I only just hit this one with some fertilizer earlier in the season when I first planted it and then like once it got into production I gave it some fertilizer. It probably could have taken a little bit more as I was heading like into late August. Overall though you can see this plant is super productive. One of the reasons for this is because in this section that I'm at right now this used to be a part of the chicken pen. So the chickens you know had all their droppings down in this section so there's probably a high level of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and all a lot of the micronutrients all mixed into the soil which probably helped the plant overall. You'll notice down here I allowed part of the plant to just kind of grow on the ground. Here I did it with this one and I did it with a with my sun gold cherry right here. One thing you'll notice is the part of the plant that I allowed to trellis and grow on the ground or not trellis just grow on the ground look how unhealthy it is look how many disease problems it has. So you can see the difference a lot of times when you have plants that are in contact with the ground you can get a lot more soil borne organisms soil borne diseases as opposed to the stuff that's it's a lot healthier even though it's some of the new growth it's also healthier but when you remove a lot of the growth from pruning to a single stem or to like one or two stems you'll notice that it doesn't it makes it so the disease can't spread up a plant. So not only does adding something like potassium help plants grow later into the season but also maintaining the plant and proper pruning techniques. I did allow this one to get way too bushy you'll notice recently I just haven't done a good enough job of tying it up I've got a lot of other things I'm working on in the garden but the production is still massive the tomatoes are still delicious and I cannot complain. So I think it was a pretty successful burying the banana underneath the tomato plant I would say it's more successful than in the past when I buried sardines under a tomato plant and I've also buried another kind of fish manhattan I believe it's called bunker underneath the tomato plant but that stuff I kind of had to like buy when it comes to the bananas I didn't go out and buy them just for burying them I just kind of used them because they were going to be waste already and I didn't feel like making banana bread with them so I just buried them under the plant. So again I want to go out and buy bananas solely to put under a plant but if you've got some bananas rotting while your tomatoes are starting to go into the ground it could be a good idea to stick them in there. If it's not the right time to put them underneath your tomato plant I suggest you compost the bananas because you'll still get a lot of the nutrition from the bananas if you can compost them then you can just kind of place that around your soil and it's probably a little easier method but overall I'm kind of I'm happy with the experiment I had a lot of fun and I think I'll have to try it again in the future just with like a few different plants and a few different varieties because I only tried it with one variety even though I have this variety growing in like multiple different places so it kind of gives us an idea I still want to do like maybe three different varieties three with bananas and three without just so I have like a better kind of control and a better way to compare them really happy with uh the way it came out though there's no way the banana caused any harm if anything it just helped the plants grow later into the season I think. Before I let you go there's just a couple more things I want to mention and a few plants that I really want to show you one is this one right here this is the mountain magic tomato look at the production look how healthy it is this late in the season almost no disease so it's really important to make sure your plants have the right level of nutrition in order to perform well late in the season potassium is important for that but it's also important to have varieties that are disease resistant that probably makes the biggest difference so this one right here obviously has really good resistance to late blight I mean it's performing beautiful almost zero problems and that's really important if you want to be able to grow late into the season you can't just think you can uh you know throw bananas under a plant that has late blight problems and think that's going to cure all your problems no you can grow those varieties but once it gets starts to get really late in the season you're going to want to have some varieties that just are basically have bomb-proof resistance to late blight just like the one I've talked often about the cherry bomb tomato I'll put some clips in of the cherry bomb tomato right now to show you this plant always performs fantastic for me late in the season this is the one when I make videos called uh you know I make tomato tree videos the cherry bomb is always the one I show because it continues to grow and produce so late in the season the plants get absolutely massive so this right here though the mountain magic is definitely another tomato I'm always going to be growing because these are going to be providing just huge harvest later in the season when a lot of tomato plants have just given up some of my heirloom varieties like even this one over here it just starts to get a lot of blight issues late in the season the production slows down and um and it's just not as reliable as some of the ones that just have natural disease resistance but when you combine natural disease resistance and also a good level of nutrition that's how you get great production late in the season this way you can be eating tomatoes like heading deep into fall that's today's video growers thanks for watching we hope you enjoyed it we hope you got something out of it me and tuck had an absolute blast out here the little guy's been out here he's just been kind of roaming around roaming around doing his thing we were trying to keep the video kind of focused on just uh just what the video was about so if you love seeing tuck in the videos make sure you spam some hearts down low we've got some more videos coming out real soon where this guy's going to be in it a lot more you know he loves being in the harvest videos because we're always grabbing snacks and whatever snack we grab this guy's got to have just a little taste of it because it's got to be tuck approved and you got to make sure you pay the guy because he works so dang hard he never quits never takes a day off so we had a lot of fun we hope you guys got some value out of the video and we wanted to be obviously as honest about it as possible so we don't think it's worth it to go buy bananas and stick them under a plant but if you have them they're rotting it definitely doesn't hurt but this also just makes me think of more and more that i need to make sure i stay on top of giving my plants a top dressing getting later into the season because you know a lot of the nutrition has been taken up from those that little area that the tomato plants are in and they can't just get nutrition from really far so i'm always going to stay on top now of giving my plants a nice you know a nice hit of fertilizer going late into the season to keep the production coming and coming the new tuck wanted to mention to check out the merch down at jamespergione.com grab a gardening is life shirt grab a team grow shirt grab a grow shirt in general and just be part of the team we also wanted to send a thank you to one of our new channel members alan mcfee thanks for being a part of team grow thanks for having your hand in everything we're doing out here all the plants all the experiments and all the joy that me and tuck get just running around grabbing harvests and sharing everything with you so we had a blast we hope you guys enjoyed the video if you did share this video with your friends hit the like button hit the subscribe button but it really makes a massive difference when you share this video with your friends we're trying to get this message of growing food in your own backyard out to everybody so tuck and james will be back again real soon we out