BTW Emily, you mentioned Ensete bananas had edible roots. That got me thinking, do you know if I need to protect these Musa bananas from gophers?
I can’t provide useful information about establishing a banana outside in zone 7, but 50 years ago, one of my mom’s friends had a banana tree in zone 7. She brought it inside every winter and stored it on its side under the bed. Alas, the story is about storing the banana tree under the bed and I have never heard anything about producing fruit.
If you’re in zone 7b, both of those should do well for you! They may die all the way down to the roots every year, but if you put a cage around them and fill it with autumn leaves or some other insulation that can breathe a bit (not thick layers of plastic), that should help the stems overwinter, and they may have more of a head start in spring, which can help a great deal to get them ready to fruit before winter hits.
It may take a few years before they flower and fruit for you. That’s what I’ve seen indicated in forum threads about bananas, anyway. It should happen eventually, but because the stem will keep getting frozen in winter and have to be regrown from the ground up, it’ll take longer than growing them in a tropical climate.
The first year they fruit, you’ll probably only get a few tiny bananas. Don’t worry, the harvest will get better each year. The fruits will get more abundant as the roots get bigger and stronger, just like most fruit trees (even though banana plants aren’t technically trees).
I would LOVE a California Gold, but I’ve never seen one available except in really expensive listings on Ebay. It was originally a sport of Dwarf Orinoco that’s even more cold hardy, which makes it the most cold hardy seedless banana other than Musa basjoo (which I’m told doesn’t taste all that great). It was discovered maybe ten years ago, and it’s still very rare.
I . . . have no idea about gophers! The thought never occurred to me! Now that you bring it up, yeah, gopher protection would probably be smart. Bananas have a big, juicy, edible root ball. I bet gophers would love it. 
The roots aren’t spreading or woody or deep, unlike fruit trees. Maybe if you buried a plastic crate in the ground, with the top inch above the soil, you could put a banana corm in that, and it would allow for ample drainage (which bananas want) and keep gophers at bay?
So far, here’s what I’ve found about planting young bananas in zone 7b (which is the zone I’m in).
It’s probably not the best idea ever to plant them before the last frost date. Even if they’re cold hardy. I’ve now killed three baby Musa basjoos that way. 
Don’t let them dry out. Definitely don’t them let get too much water. This is a hard combination. If in doubt, water them less than you think they need.
In my dry summers, I think the best solution is for me to mulch them well, and water them a little bit every day with a watering can or drip irrigation.
In my sodden, soaking winters – well, the snow likes to kill them. I don’t think it’s the cold per se, since I’ve been trying with cold hardy clones that should be able to handle it, but rather the snowmelt. It makes the soil soaking wet, wetness that doesn’t evaporate out, which rots the corms.
My plan going forward is to plant all my bananas on a berm right next to a swale, with a whole lot of mulch around them. The swale will allow excess water to collect near the roots in my dry summers, and it’ll allow excess water to drain out in my wet winters. The mulch will be there to keep moisture in the soil in summer, and to keep warmth in the soil in winter.
I’m thinking I may plant sweet potatoes in those swales in the summers. Since the banana roots will be higher up, I don’t think I’ll disturb the banana roots when I dig up sweet potato roots, and I suspect those two will make a good polyculture. I’d like to add brassicas on the berms, as well, in the hopes that they’ll provide a nice living mulch (and drinker of snowmelt!) around the bananas.
I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that anything I overwinter should be planted on a berm, and anything I grow as an annual in spring / summer / fall should be planted in a swale.
If your summers are wetter or your winters are drier, this may be different for you. I live in Utah, and we get about 80% of our water as snow. Most of the rest is cold rain in warmer days of midwinter. Rot and mold and mildew definitely happen a lot when it’s winter.
By the way, my plan is to dig up a pup from any banana plant that has one by the end of the fall, and overwinter the pup indoors. It seems like a good idea for a backup!
Of course, once I have a successful landrace, anything that overwinters without backups will be much more likely to get its seeds saved and shared around. 
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We do have wet winters and long hot dry summers like you (Southern Oregon here). Thank you for that feedback, I’ll try to give them well draining conditions. Our soil is clay but I have plenty of areas with a gentle grade and the soil is pretty draining above the lower sub-soil. I hope wet but not sopping is OK conditions during the zone 7 winter if it is protected from freezing, because our soil does stay quite wet throughout the winter.
Based on your feedback about banana roots not being too deep or spreading I’m thinking of possibly using plastic barrels with holes drilled in the sides and bottoms as gopher protection. I guess I have at least a season to figure it out while I up pot them 
I am rooting for your success in germinating all the varieties you received! Good luck and thanks for doing this hard work and sharing your knowledge.
Thanks, Noel!
My soil is basically pure sand, so it holds very little water at all. If you have wet winters and clay soil, you may have a bigger challenge. I think I would recommend making a berm, and then putting a ton of mulch that can drain well on top, and planting the banana plant into the mulch itself.
A huge pile of autumn leaves may work great. Not grass clippings, which tend to turn into thick slimy mat that holds water against things. Wood chips might work okay; I don’t know much about those. I plan to experiment with wood chips this year, so I’m sure I’ll learn.
I don’t know for sure if this would work, but I read years ago about someone who raked up their autumn leaves (they were oak leaves; I don’t know if that makes any difference) and put a baby banana plant on top. It grew vigorously and happily in that huge pile of leaves, having no contact with soil.
Let me know what you find by experience! It’s useful to have an idea of how well my experience is likely to be useful to people with the opposite soil type. 
@UnicornEmily Thank you for this. If I grew the banana plant in a berm or pile of leaves I’d have to get automated irrigation on it because it would dry out so fast. But its an option. Luckily I have a season at least to brainstorm and figure out what I’ll do. Do you have any clue as to what measurements a mature “dwarf” banana plant’s root system might come out to in terms of width and depth in medium heavy soil?
@APUCommunityGarden wow that is an amazing story! How did she manage to keep the tree moist enough and yet not rotting on its side all winter?
I’m not sure about banana roots! I think they get bigger every year, regardless of the height of the plants, and that results in you getting more plants from the same roots every year. I don’t know if they get any deeper. My guess would be not by much, if they do, and that they just spread outwards in every direction. I don’t really know, though!
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I’m in zone 8b and have no idea if this is helpful at all but I have a 60 year old banana. No idea what verity as that information was lost with my grandfather, if he even knew. It’s probably in the worst possible spot for growing well (too much shade, not enough sun) but the pups have never grown farther than 10 feet from main roots but that’s rare and they mostly tend to grow anywhere from right against the main “tree” to about 4 feet away.
It gets pretty tall but I wonder if maybe that’s because the growing conditions aren’t ideal. It gets pretty tall but it collapses under the weight of the fruit after about 4 rows form. They’re fairly small, fat bananas and I’ve never been able to try them.
I’m very tempted to dig up one of the pups and plant it in a pot on the side of my house for better sun. They keep growing until the first hard frost of the year.
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anyone who’s growing bananas, if you can, i would definitely recommend using the bananas circle method. @UnicornEmily, i think you mentioned it earlier in the thread. I have half our bananas on berm/swales on contour and the other half in a banana circle and the banana circle ones are always the most vigorous and faster to fruit, because they have access to more fertility directly from the compost pile. I also wonder if there would be a significant enought amount of heat from the pile that would help with overwintering in a zone that’s right on the edge. Even if they’re not in a circle, they should definitely be up on a berm to keep the trunks from rotting while giving the roots access to water.
Because our soil is so sandy here, I read a lot of accounts online about how banana circles don’t really work here when i first moved here, but that hasn’t been my experience at all. You just have to plant other things on the berm to hold the soil in place. I supposed with clay soil, it will be more labor to do this sort of earthwork though, so i don’t know if it works in every context.
That sounds like something to try! If it’s flowering and making fruit but then can’t manage to ripen it because it’s too tall, maybe it’s trying to get sunlight that isn’t available? I’ve never heard of anything like that, and it’s fascinating. I’d love to hear what has worked for you when you finally get fruit you can eat!
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Wow, that’s cool to hear! So theoretically, intercropping bananas with brassicas would be a great idea? I was thinking they’d make a great companion planting because brassicas might act as living mulch to keep the banana corms warmer, but if they would also keep the soil of the berm stable better, that would be another benefit. Yay! I’ve definitely got to try that!
Do compost piles go totally dormant in freezing weather? If they’re still active, even a little bit, they ought to provide a bit of extra warmth. Even if they are totally dormant, at least they’d be some insulation, which can’t hurt. Meanwhile, that extra heat in spring and fall would be bound to come in handy.
I haven’t tried with brassicas specifically, but i don’t see why they wouldn’t work -I would be interested to see a more northern take on the banana circle, since you mostly see these in tropical areas!
About the heat generated from inside the pit - I just use it to compost plant material, so i don’t think it gives off too much heat, but if that was the goal, you could experiment with putting more nitrogen rich material in the pit - some people do put their food scraps or divert greywater to them. I was thinking along the lines of the way some farmers use compost piles to heat a greenhouse in the winter. In general, I just find they works really well to both provide a place where water naturally collects and nutrients are passively provided to the bananas. The other thing I like about the system is it’s the only place in my garden that I feel comfortable disposing of weeds that have a lot of seed heads on them. Because the compost pile isn’t treated like typical compost that gets turned and then spread onto crop beds - instead, anything that’s placed in the pile is continuously being covered by new biomass and rotting in place and the nutrients are absorbed the bananas, it doesn’t really give the chance for weed seeds to spread.
I use a similar strategy for winter squashes - pile the kitchen scraps, including the squash guts from every good tasting squash we eat (garden, market, grocery store, doesn’t matter) in the spot where I want to grow next year’s squash all winter, and then see what sprouts out of it. I haven’t been disappointed yet.
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Oooh, I like the idea of having a place to put weed seed heads. You have a good point – if the compost is never going to be moved, and more is going to keep being piled on top of it, and there’s hot compost (such as urine) often added on top, I bet you wouldn’t get a lot of those weeds sprouting. Plus, if they did, they wouldn’t too much of a nuisance because you don’t plan to put anything there except for compost anyway.
Come to think of it, a banana circle may be a really great place for a composting toilet. If you never plan to move the compost, ever, and bananas don’t mind having hot compostable material right near them, and they need a lot of fertilizer anyway, that would be a great place to compost human waste. Combining that with weed seed heads for cover material, which I can’t use as mulch and always have lots of, that may work great!
(Yes, the subject of humanure is a bit disgusting, but frankly, if I ever want to have a viable closed-loop system, returning humanure safely to the land is essential. Plus, if the grid ever goes down permanently, I want to have a plan to dispose of it safely. My family’s health matters more than my cultural comfort zone. So this is something I often think about wanting to have. I want to have a way to do it that is safe, sustainable, and not disgusting. 
)
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You GUYS! Check out these really weird seeds!
They look completely different from the other banana seeds I’ve gotten before! (See this post in this very thread, which I’m linking to for your convenience because it was pretty far back.)
The other ones looked squat and oblong, with the hilum (the part where the seed met the stem – sort of like a belly button in animals) being up top, in the middle. These ones remind me of slightly tapered pencil erasers, with the flat bottom being the hilum.
These are for Musa haekkinenii (I had to look that up to remember how to spell it ), which is a species in the Callimusa group. All the species I’ve collected seeds for before this have been in the Eumusa group. I’ve read that Eumusa species can usually cross with each other, and Callimusa species can usually cross with each other, but you can’t usually get species in the two different groups to cross.
This extreme difference in seed shape definitely implies that the two groups aren’t closely related. It makes me think that the Musa genus should really be split into two genera.
Anyway, this is my first Callimusa, so the shape of the seeds came as a shock. They’re so WEIRD!
Very cool. 
Wow, check out these pictures I found of its bananas on this site:
and
I’m particularly happy to see the second picture, with the fruits cut open, so I can look at how the seeds are arranged in the fruit. It looks like the flat parts point towards the center of the fruit, which makes me wonder if there’s some kind of core that runs through the middle. It will be interesting to see!
Looks like very small fruits with very little fruit flesh, but that’s okay – that’s what breeding and selection are for.
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WE HAVE GERMINATION!!!
And this time it has to be banana seeds, because look, you can see the seed coating attached to the little itty bitty sprouts:
So this is what newly sprouted banana seedlings look like! That’s incredibly helpful for plant identification purposes. I need to know what the tiny sprouts look like so that when I direct sow them, I will know to leave them alone when I’m pulling out weeds.
I’m so happy they’ve finally sprouted for me!
Data to share!
Species: Musa markkuana
Time to germination: Five weeks. April 25, 2023-June 1, 2023.
Germination rate: 3 seeds out of 8, so far. That’s pretty great!
Age of seeds: They were harvested in the fall of 2022, so about 6-8 months.
Special treatment: I scarified each seed gently with a nail file, stopping when I could see a tiny white dot. After that, I presoaked the seeds for three days (I put them in a container with just enough water to reach halfway up the seeds, not covering them completely), and then put them ON TOP of damp native soil in a clear plastic container with a clear lid on top. Then I left them alone.
I have been checking on them about once a week ever since. Today, I finally saw baby plants!
What comes next?
Good question! This is all new territory for me.
Here’s what I did. I immediately took them out to my garden. I figured they would have a very good chance of needing no hardening off if I took them outside as soon as they sprouted. I also figured they would have a better chance of being neither underwatered nor overwatered outside nestled into little piles of damp autumn leaves.
I scooped them out with a teaspoon, scooping a generous amount of the damp native soil around each seed, in the hopes that the roots stay untouched.
I also scooped off all the rest of the top layer of native soil and plonked each spoonful down in a different spot, in case there are more seeds out of the eight almost ready to germinate.
Yay! I have banana seedlings! I have reached the next stage!
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Congratulations @UnicornEmily !!! I am so excited for you with your first banana seed germination! Your hard work is coming to fruition. It does seem that the scarification is helping after all. That + patience must be what I was missing back when I tried to sprout banana seeds. Thanks for sharing the photos, they are so cute! I wish you luck with germination of your other banana seeds.
congratulations, Emily ! interresting to read that you immediately took them out. spontaneously, I would have waited iuntil they grow stronger, but I understand your point. look forward to see how they do.