To: "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Bananas
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 15:51:02 -0600
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