How long does it take a seed grown banana tree to make fruit?
That depends on a lot of factors. The awesome news is that bananas are day-neutral and completely ignore seasons. Their natural life cycle is “I’ll fruit when I’m big enough.” There’s a ton of potential there for adapting them to work as a seed-grown annual.
In theory, under optimal conditions with short bananas, flowering and fruiting within six months is possible. In practice, it’s far more likely to take three or more years.
The plant will flower sooner if:
- The root mass is larger. This usually happens because it’s been in the ground for several years.
- The weather is hotter.
- The plant gets more water.
- The plant gets more fertilizer.
In cool temperatures or clay soil, it’s easy to overwater bananas, so you’d need to be careful. In hot temperatures, dry air, and sandy soil, it’s hard to overwater them. From what Arizona Fruit Trees says, it looks like bananas do awesome with a constant flowing water source. Drip irrigation works. So does greywater, and so do rivers. Stagnant water will kill them, so you couldn’t plant them next to a lake.
Once a plant flowers, it usually takes another four months, ish, to go from that stage to ripe bananas. If frost is impending or animals are likely to steal the fruit, you can pick the bunch about a month early and take it indoors to ripen. As with most plants, the fruit will be sweeter and more flavorful if you can leave it on the plant until ripe. Grocery store bananas are always picked very, very unripe.
In temperate climates, the fastest you are likely to be able to realistically expect fruit is two years: year one going from seed to mature pseudostem that’s almost ready to flower, and then if you protect the pseudostem all the way up to the top, it’ll pick up where it left off in spring, flower immediately, and you’ll have fruit before frost.
If you don’t protect the pseudostem, and it has to regrow the whole thing from the roots every year, it may take four or five years to fruit.
If you start the plant indoors during the winter and thereby give it several extra months of uninterrupted growing time, fruiting in the first year is probably feasible.
This is all assuming dwarf bananas. If you want really tall ones, it’ll take a lot longer. I want dwarf ones that can be harvested while standing on the ground. I think that’s probably ideal for most people, especially in temperate climates.
The first year you get fruit, you’ll probably only get one or two hands of bananas. Each year afterwards, you should get another hand or two. Ten hands or more is common if the root mass of the clonal colony is huge and well-established. So if you get a harvest the first year, it’ll be small, but there’ll be more every year the root mass has had time to grow larger. Fruit trees are similar.
A mature mat that is several years old may fruit more than once in a year. Each pseudostem will only fruit once, but a mat can easily have many fruiting pseudostems at the same time.
Here are a few more thoughts.
Each pseudostem will only fruit once, so once it has fruited, you can chop it down and use it for mulch. Banana pseudostems make fantastic mulch: they’re full of nutrients and break down quickly. You can also eat them, if you feel so inclined. I’ve heard banana stems described as tasting similar to corn. It’d probably be a nice vegetable.
Bananas are naturally bat-pollinated, so if you want viable seeds, you may need to hand-pollinate. This is probably a bonus if the cultivar is parthenocarpic and you want seedless fruit most of the time. Happily, all bananas I know of are monoecious. I’m not sure how common it is for them to be self-fertile.
So, yeah, it depends on a lot of factors! Most likely you’d want to think of them as being similar to a fruit tree, but I think eventually, it’s very possible to adapt them to work as a seed-grown annual, just like tomatoes and your sweet potatoes. 
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I just had a brainwave!
Ginger is a close relative of bananas. (So are canna lilies.) It’s only hardy to zone 9. It can’t tolerate standing water or much drought. This sounds like it wants very similar growing conditions to bananas.
A few months ago, I stuck some ginger from the grocery store into a spot in my garden, curious to see if it would sprout. It did! I now have a little ginger plant there. The interesting thing is, it’s in a space that I suspect may stay a lot warmer than most of my yard, because it’s next to my shed that’s full of water storage.
Sooooo, in theory, if it comes back in spring, wouldn’t that mean I could get away with sticking a zone 9 banana plant there? Or at least a zone 8?
I think I’m going to buy a bunch of grocery store ginger roots and stick them all over my yard, in places that look like a microclimate that may provide extra warmth in the winter. I’ll make a note of anywhere that ginger resprouts in spring. If it resprouts, I’ll plant a zone 8 banana pup next to it; that should be a great microclimate for it.
If it doesn’t come back in spring, but it did well in summer, I may stick a zone 7 banana pup in its place, and see if that’s a nice microclimate for a banana that’s already okay with my zone.
That’s right, I’m thinking ginger may make a great test crop – it’s closely related, it wants similar conditions, and it’s inexpensive and easy to replace if it dies. Excellent.
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Hmmm! Shane, it just occurred to me that an Ensete-canna cross may be an interesting way to breed a new root crop, as there may be compatibility there. Looking at chromosome numbers:
Ensete bananas: 9 chromosomes
Cannas: 18 chromosomes
Those could match up, maybe!
Especially since they’re closely related.
An Ensete x canna cross would probably be triploid if it worked, right? So it might not produce seeds. And Ensetes don’t make pups, so if a cool cross appeared, it would have to be propagated by division. Still, division is a common form of propagation for both Ensetes and cannas, so that would be reasonable. And if it did make viable seeds, that could be even more interesting.
Just firing from the hip here, but can you cross pollinate Banana with ginger?
Those aren’t closely related, they are in same order which means quite a distant relation. Similarly close relation than primates have with each other. Even same family (that’s the next classification step) is still mostly too distant to be cross unless they are in same genus (that’s the next classification step after that) and even then they mostly aren’t comparable. Like tomato and eggplant are in same genus, but way too removed to have change of crossing.
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Canna and ensete have the same chromosome numbers.
Levels of classification are arbitrary, based on whatever morphology someone in the 18th century thought was important.
Intergeneric crosses among the zingiberaceae seem to be easy whenever people try (several reports of these from the horticultural trade).
Interfamily crosses are known in the monocots (and arguments rage over how wide orders like liliaceae should be anyway). Link the example here- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pbr.13058
Basically Burbank proved that you cannot predict whether a cross will be possible or not in advance. And even if one particular combo of Canna x Ensete doesnt work, you could find the next mix of species and clones works (at least enough to start the process). Eugene McCarthy argues that chromosome counts are not a reliable guide for whether a hybrid is possible. And when chromosome counts dont align it is very common for polyploidy to restore fertility in subsequent generations (many domestic crops have this process as their origin). My advice is to get out there and start flinging pollen around, but be prepared to hit a decent rate of dead ends.
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It might be arbitary, but it gives some clue how closely related they are. Not saying wide crosses aren’t possible, but I think it’s good to have some kinda scale in likelyhoods. Saying they are closely related supresses them all down to small family when they mostly are quite far apart. If they were really close relatives there would be crosses made or even natural hybrids since they come from and are grown in same geographic area.
Ensete are from tropical africa to SE Asia. Canna are from the Americas. And from my own experience hybridising within Canna, the way their flowers work (bird pollinated, highly specialised to particular bird sizes, with heavy pollen that is highly perishable) you get almost zero spontaneous hybrids between even two cross fertile canna species growing right beside each other. Definitely no guarantee of success, but I am very excited to see someone attempt to cross a dozen different species of canna onto a single mass flowering ensete (if they can get the timing lined up, which again is a significant practical barrier to getting them together).
Yeah, getting things to flower at the same time would definitely be the biggest challenge. I figure my best bet is to simply grow a whole lot of both, with as much genetic diversity within each species as possible, and hope to get some plants that happen to sync with each other. 
Do you think ginger and Musa bananas might be able to cross? The chromosome numbers are 22 (ginger) and 11 (Musa bananas), which seems like there’s potential. A cross like that probably wouldn’t help my Musa bananas give me tastier fruit, but you never know. If nothing else, it would be fun to see what happens if it does succeed.
My theory is that the more interesting and weird ideas I have to try, the more likely one of the darts I’m throwing around in the dark will eventually hit a dartboard.
I mean, I have a specific idea of what I want (new varieties of cold hardy bananas with tasty fruit), but I figure, why limit myself to just one project? Especially when it’s the same project everybody else wants. There are probably a lot fewer people trying silly, weird things.
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Wide surveys of hybridisability (cool word) suggest chromosome number is only a rough guide for what is possible (especially in plants and animals with large numbers of smaller chromosomes like birds).
I agree about the dart throwing analogy. And a single wide/weird cross can be subsequently selected in a lot of different possible directions (provided you share the material early on).
Excellent point about sharing anything new early on so that other people can play with it. It would probably be a good idea to clone the first plant (by division, cuttings, pups / suckers, whatever works) and share it around, so that different people can select it in different ways. Different climates may help to select it in different ways, too, which can also be interesting.
The ability to easily clone early wide hybrids is a huge advantage since they often need another lucky event to restore fertility. A lot of wild clonally propagated “species” behave this way too (Opuntia cacti are a great example- many species are just lucky hybrid clones with limited fertility). Commercial bananas are an example of this that could be waiting a very long time to become fertile again (and nobody wants gritty banana fruit anyway)
That’s why I shaid both are and are grown in same geographic area. I tend to think that nature has lot more tries than humans can even if natural pollination doesn’t quite line up. There are just so many changes for it to happen that it easily makes more than what humans can do in a lifetime. More importantly I would doubt it’s first time someone has come up with the idea and it’s likely been tested manually many times over. So it’s not likely to be something that just happens when you try it. Best change is that it works with some more obscure species combo that is not been tried, but that adds thousands of combos that aren’t likely to work and if some works you might need to make 100 tries each to realise that change. So it’s not something I would call close relation. Anyone can try whatever they want. I would just make distinction in relation so that people don’t get overly exited about change that likely isn’t there. If there is no precident then it’s likely to be that that cross is unlikely or extremily time consuming exersice that would take thousands of tries.
Forming a hybrid seed is only the first step. There are plenty of genera like orchids and Sarracenia/Nepenthes where natural hybrids happen all the time. They rarely go on to form new species because they tend to not fit any functional niche right off the bat. At best they back cross to either parent species (providing a very useful form of gene flow between otherwise distinct populations). Feral cousins of crops that grow on the margins of fields often do this as well.
Wide crossing isn’t an especially fast route to a refined crop, so people should pursue it knowing that it will probably take many years to stabilise/select into something useful. But by comparison the two hybridisation events that led to the creation of the first wheats has been replicated and it took them about a decade (improving that initial population into modern wheat varieties took generations afterwards). Perennials that take multiple years to mature (and often need extra effort to remove unwanted plants compared to annuals) take correspondingly more time (though selection of superior clones with high heterozygosity is sometimes an option that can lead to good early results, but makes subsequent breeding a longer shot at producing something equally good). Anyway- just wanted to make sure I’m not bouncing ideas here with a combatative mindset (plain text can often be read in a variety of tones). Glad to see your counterpoint on the concept.
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(Nods.) All good points, both of you. I agree that any one specific weird idea isn’t guaranteed to work, and the chances probably aren’t even high. No big deal! The whole point is to come up with a whole bunch of easy-to-try weird things and try them all whenever the opportunity arises. The more weird things I try, the more likely I am to hit something.
I think it was Terry Pratchett (in his satirical fantasy series Discworld, which is hilarious) who had a main character going into a country known for its mad scientists.
The main character is told, “Yeah, those inventors are madmen. Ninety-nine out of a hundred of their projects are a complete waste of time.”
The main character says, “Then why do people put up with them?”
“Because that one hundredth project can change everything.”
That’s my attitude about stuff like wide crosses. It’s unlikely to work, but as long as there’s a low barrier to entry (for instance, I already have the plants in order to eat them and they happen to be flowering at the same time), why not try it?
Usually when I’m writing books (I write lighthearted fantasy), the first idea I come up with is boring and has been done a million times. Also the second. And the third. It’s when I start getting to the tenth or twelfth that more original ideas start coming out. Sometimes it takes a lot longer. I usually don’t stop until I find something that makes me go, “Ooh, I’ve never seen that before, and I want to see that done well!” Then it’s worth my time to write that story.
This approach works great for humor. It also works great for other things. In fact, I think all creativity (including plant breeding) benefits from this sort of approach. I suspect John Cleese agrees with me:
I highly, highly, HIGHLY recommend watching the John Cleese lecture on creativity. It’s amazing.
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9 posts were split to a new topic: Breeding pineapples and kiwis
I didn’t manage to remember to dig up a pup and move it last year but I did remember this year!
With any luck we’ll see if it manages to fruit this year. This spot has plenty of sun and it’s not fighting with the back of the house and a pecan tree to get it.
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That’s awesome. 
I’ve experimented this year with putting my banana pups in full shade, in full sun, and in partial shade. Surprisingly, the ones in the full shade seem to be the happiest!
I read somewhere recently – I think it was in Perennial Vegetables – that hot dry air tends to damage banana leaves, so fragile new banana leaves can be better off in full shade in a desert. So far, that seems to match with what I’m seeing.
That jives with what the Arizona Fruit Trees YouTube channel has said about banana plants. He says that in a hot dry climate, banana roots need to be in full shade, preferably in a spot where the leaves can grow up into full sun.
So far this year, the banana pups on the north side of my house seem to be doing the best, and the ones on the east sides of structures (with full morning sun and full afternoon shade) seem to be doing okay, too. The ones on the south sides of structures, which get full sun all day, seem to be suffering.
It would be very odd indeed if a plant that is known for loving full sun is best situated on the north side of my house, but I’m starting to think that’s going to be the case.
Perhaps this may be true for many moist-soil-loving plants in my climate. Perhaps roots in full shade that can grow up into full sun is ideal. In which case, plants that grow at least a foot tall before the bananas leaf out, and no taller than three or four feet in total, may be ideal. Preferably things that can grow through the winter, and provide an extra layer of living mulch for warmth and moisture absorption.
Bonus points if they have leaves thick enough to shade the soil well without crowding the roots much, and leaves thin enough to make it easy for banana leaves to find a gap to push through.
I’ve contemplated before whether brassicas may be an ideal companion plant for bananas. I’m starting to think they really may be, in my climate. I need to try it this year.