Oh my, you?ve done a magnificent job taking care of your in-ground bananas. The structure is superb, like building a mini-greenhouse. In fact, I?ve been on a couple of archaeology digs where our housing wasn?t as nice.
causing them to rot, and didn't it smell too.
There?s nothing quite like the ?scent? of rotting banana pseudostems, is there? I imagine you also discovered that the banana sap permanently stains any part of clothing it touches.
So what sort of temperature did it get down to, and for how long.
Our ?Big Freeze?, the worst in 20 years, came in January. We had 4 consecutive nights of below freezing temps (day temps all above freezing) for a total of 50 hours below freezing. The absolute minimum temp for my area was 23°F (-5°C) although that wasn?t for more than a ½ hour or so on two nights. It wreaked havoc on a lot of our plants. We don?t experience a real autumn where temperatures slowly decrease and allow plants to harden off, so it hit when plants were still pretty frisky...shocked the leaves right off of them, and then the branches, and even the roots for some of the truly tropicals.
Last year the bananas survived a minus10.7c frost
That?s remarkable, but our terminology isn?t on the same wavelength: What you call a ?frost? is a ?hard freeze? in our lexicon. Frost for us is rime, frozen dew ? high humidity and above freezing to about 38°F (3°C)
Freeze is between 32°F (0°C) and 27°F (-3°C)
Hard Freeze is below 27°F (-3°C)
These are U.S. National Weather Service terms used for crop warnings and most gardeners use them as well. Do you refer to all temperatures below freezing as ?frosts??
I guess you may be growing Musa Basjoo
Actually, we are on the far northern limit of in-ground edible Musa production. Not many M. basjoo ? they?re very nice ornamentals, but mostly grown further north. The most typical Musa cultivar in our area is called ?Orinoco? ? eaten like a plantain when mature but unripe, and dessert quality if left to ripen fully. They?ve been in the area many years, get very large and prolifically pup, so it?s a ?passalong? plant (no one buys this cultivar because it?s shared by neighbors and friends). It?s a semi-reliable fruiter, but much too large to protect, up to 7m.
Another favorite here (ornamental only) is Musa sumatrana aka zebrina aka ?Rojo? aka Blood Banana
http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/showimage/55536/. That?s the only one I have at present and it?s not protected because it will come back from a freeze here.
Protection, if practiced, is primarily wrapping the pseudostems with a few layers of newspaper and tying a layer of burlap over it. Some are now wrapping with frost cloth, what I think you refer to as fleece, for prized cultivars. The main purpose is to protect the pseudostem. The leaves return very rapidly here as it warms up.
You have many more cultivars of ornamental bananas than are found in the U.S. I?d never heard of Ensete ventricosum Montbeliardii, and a quick check showed it?s almost impossible to find in the U.S., yet readily available in the U.K. and Europe. I do have on my wish list a Musella lasiocarpa, the Chinese Yellow Banana.
http://www.smgrowers.com/products/plants/plantdisplay.asp?plant_id=2658 (2 images). You might very well be able to grow that one outside. It?s a dwarf, maybe 1.5m-2m and the flowers are stunning, huge and last for months.
I just attended a lecture on ?Growing Bananas in a Marginal Climate?. If you?re interested in edible bananas I can pass along the info and recommended cultivars that you might be able to grow.
Monica
