Bananas

With July's heat here, I thought it was about time to take a look at a few of the more impressive plants in my garden. I'll start today with the bananas (Musa basjoo). It's late enough in the season for them to be a focus...

...but there's still plenty of time left for them to become truly huge and awesome. It's nice to snapshot what they look like at different times during the year.

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If you remember, I protected these with a few feet of leaf mulch in the late fall and covered them with a plastic sheet to reduce the moisture level. It was a mild enough winter that most of the existing pseudostems survived (their lowest portion remained undamaged by freezing), so there were plenty of stems at the start of the season. Here they are now... maybe 16 of them or so?

You can see several small new pups at the edge of the clump too. I've not had a lot of success digging these up, but I might try again this year as the clump is getting pretty big.

I didn't remove the leaves this year, just left them in place. As you can see they're pretty much gone now. I haven't fertilized too much this year either yet, and we've had a pretty long spell without rain now... has it been three weeks or more?

Still, the bananas are about 12' (3.6m) tall right now.

Looking quite good if you don't mind me saying so!

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