North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Doreen Howard" <gardendiva@charter.net>]

Claude Sweet wrote:

> How do you pollinate the female banana flowers when the male flowers
> only appear after the flower stalk has ceased producing the female
flowers?
>
> I have grown edible bananas for years and the cultivars I have grown
> don't require pollination and even if they are pollinated, rarely will
> they produce seed. It is this problem which makes the creation of new
> cultivars such a time consuming process.  I forget the exact amount of
> fresh fruit a hybridizer needs to pulp to extract seeds, but it was
> somewhere in the hundreds of pounds of fruit per viable seed.

I grow several varieties--Raji Puri, Dwarf Cavenish and Zan Moreno--and they
flower at different times, but close together.  You are right about many
cultivars not requiring pollination, but I do it anyway on the following
theory.  When I grew them in the ground, the banana flowers that were
visited by sweat bees and hummingbirds had the sweetest fruits.  And these
fruits had prominent seeds.  I may be wrong in my theory, but I'm still
experimenting.
Doreen Howard