Waking Up My Banana Plants After Winter

Welcome to Gardening at 58 North. So in this video I'm going to be waking up my hardy banana plants here. So please excuse the mess in the background, basically I'm building a studio shed to help with my filming. At the moment it's only half complete so that's why the whole garden looks like an absolute mess. But what I'm focusing on this video is the tropical bed here which has the hardy bananas. Now these bananas are root hardy so if they're well mulched they can handle quite hard frosts but the problem is the stems themselves can only handle about minus 1, minus 2. We sometimes get minus 15 here. So what I've done last winter is I've covered them up with insulation to try and protect them and we did actually have minus 6 last winter so it wasn't too bad but I think that protection was definitely needed. Now I did already uncover one just as an experiment to see how it would do. It hasn't really put on any growth you can see it's kind of sitting there. To be honest it's been quite cold until quite recently so I think the ground is cold and one of the problems with insulating with an extra thick mulch, although it's great in winter they stop the cold getting in, that also stops the warmth getting in in springtime. So what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to uncover all these plants and then I'm going to get some water from my hot water tap. I'll keep it around 40 degrees. I don't want to burn the plants but it needs to be really warm. I'll then water each plant probably a whole watering can which for my watering can is about six litres so might be one and a half for each one. Just want to get lots of warmth back into the soil and that way that they'll start coming to grow a bit faster. Now I've actually been trying to keep the ground cold for now because the problem is if they start growing too early they start growing and pushing against the protection here or they start growing up and they have new leaves for us in May and April time and the leaves will get killed by the frost. It's the second of May today but we actually had a hard minus two frost last week so we can certainly still get frost but looking forward this week looks quite warm the long-term outlook doesn't look too bad either and if we get a very light frost I'll lose one leaf for each plant it's not a big issue so I'm actually going to uncover them now it's a bit of a risk but the thing is if I leave it until June when the risk of frost is gone that's a whole month of good growth that I could have missed on because although May can be quite cold we can often get frost. The daytime temperature is normally decent around about 12 to 15 degrees and with these kind of bananas because they're not tropical bananas they should be able to grow in those cooler conditions. So I've got two different types of bananas here basically there's four C. commensus which is these towers here and this one here and I'll put some photos up of what they look like last summer they did look really nice these are just the plain green ones without the striping but I have got one in my parents garden which they didn't protect apart from mulch on the ground because they only get about minus three minus two most winters and that's actually re-sprouting already and looking quite good. And then the other one here is Musa Bazoo which is a much hardier type of banana the one that most people think of as a hardy banana plant. This one I just kind of covered it with dead sticks from I think this was from Jerusalem artichokes and it was mounded up about this high but over winter it's rotted down and the wind has moved it so it's kind of exposed it now but you can see this is just starting to grow also down the bottom the little pups that were starting to come out is just starting to sprout as well so this looks like it survived no problem and I've had a peek of some of the other ones this one actually looks like it's starting to grow quite a lot and it's pushing against the top this one I can't see inside because I've sealed it up so tight and that one over there I can peek inside but there's not any obvious signs of growth so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to uncover them and have a look at them and see how they're doing but before I uncover the hardy bananas I'd like to give you a quick update on my Enseti ventricosum bananas so these aren't technically hardy they can take quite low temperatures and they don't mind growing cold temperatures because they're from mountainous areas of Ethiopia so these can grow at temperatures quite low but they still don't like any frost and these really aren't as hardy as the other plants they don't have that underground tuber like the other ones do and with these ones it's all in the stem now there is a bit of a corm at the bottom now these aren't technically bananas they're more known as false bananas they're not in the Musa genus they're in the Enseti genus so they are a little bit different they don't have pups or anything like that but these grow much bigger much larger plants and they are they are actually better suited to my climate because they can handle the cold growing conditions they don't need the hot summer but these has as a do need protection over winter so what I did with these last year is I seedlings they grew absolutely shoes by autumn and come November time there are massive plants I then had to cut them back and dry store them and the way you do that is you cut off the leaves cut off the roots and you just keep the main part of the stem now the main part of the stem is full of water so it doesn't technically dry out completely but you want to keep it in dry conditions so it doesn't rot then a couple of months ago I then potted these up and brought them into growth the first leaves that come out they've either been cut off from because they were cut in half when I cut them back in autumn or they kind of come out as stunted like this a bit narrow and small but now the roots are established on these and I have checked they've got a good root system starting to develop this should start putting out some larger leaves I'm going to start acclimatizing this to the outside now this week is probably a perfect week for it if you can have a really cloudy week you can acclimatize your plants without hardening them off too much so these have been in a really sunny location in my conservatory but even with the conservatory there's a bit of uv filtering through the polycarbonate plastic that makes up the roof so these aren't fully acclimatized to uv yet but we're going to have a really cloudy week this week with mild temperatures so this is the perfect week for them to harden off if I have a really hot sunny day that comes along or a cold night I will take them back inside so they don't get a shock but generally I'm just going to keep these outside now and they should harden off naturally just with it being such a cloudy gray week as you can see it's going to be like this for the whole week just kind of uniform gray cloudy weather conditions which is perfect for hardening off plants like this so I'll probably give you guys an update of these later on they are infested with aphids but that's not a huge problem these aphids they will get killed by beneficial insects like ladybirds and hoverflies and if they don't I can always wash them off the plants so I'm expecting these to do quite well but I'll go ahead now I'll uncover the bananas and I'll see how many have survived the winter I'm hoping for a hundred percent success rate because it was only minus six last winter and I have also insulated them with about almost a foot of mulch and then with the the towers as well so that's the bananas now uncovered the beds are already starting to look a little bit nicer instead of having those big insulation towers still doesn't look like much though because the time of year there's a lot of tropicals in this bed I'll show you some photos of what it did look like last summer and they're just waiting to come up basically so it will look really full by the end of summer and if you want to subscribe you can come and have a look later in the season when everything's up and it's going to look really lush again it's just that everything's dormant underground at the moment so looking at the bananas they're looking not too bad they don't look great this one as I say has started growing you can see this new growth has pushed out here this one feels quite firm it's quite a thin stem now these are all seed grown Musa Sicumensis bananas and each one did look slightly different to each other so for example that one down there is more of a dwarf one and it's kind of got this kind of smaller thicker stem the one of my parents garden is similar to that these other ones are a little bit taller and the leaves do look a bit different as well so there's a bit of variation in the genetics which is also good because it probably means they're going to grow slightly differently and be slightly different hardiness levels when it comes to winter so this one seems to be the one that grows the fastest in spring or at least the first to start to grow now that's a bit unusual because this is the shadiest spot the further you go that way in the bed the sunnier it is so this is probably showing that it's genetics and not precision that's made this one grow faster or at least come out of dormancy quicker and it's also quite a tall slender one it looks pretty bad but it is firm so i'm quite happy with that one as you can see inside the box I did also fill it with mulch in case we had it really cold it was killed down to this level it will stop the frost penetrating into the root level and looking further down we have got a little bit of rot on the surface but further down if you see if I scrape back this soft mushy layer we've got some nice solid healthy growth underneath so this one's looking pretty good i'm quite happy with this i'm what i'm going to do with all of these i'm going to rake this mulch down into the rest of the bed because it's really thick around the base i don't want to damage the actual trunk too much but this one's looking all right and hopefully that will come into growth once I start to warm up the soil a bit more also with removing some of the mulch it gets rid of some of that insulation that will let the soil warm up a little bit faster in conjunction with adding the hot water so this one here this one doesn't look as good you can see the top here's gone all mushy so that's dead but the actual main stem feels pretty good the outer layer again has been killed by the frost but the inner layer has survived that's one of the things with these hardy bananas is they can't handle frost but what it is is they have so many layers that are full of water on the outside it's almost like a sacrificial layer that gets killed by the frost and gets killed but inside the actual important growing point is protected so if i pull this back you see there's a lot of fluid but we've actually got some firmer material in there so this leaf is dead as well but further down i think that should be okay this is one of the worst out the lot but it definitely feels firmer inside so this should hopefully be okay as well if i check further down again very soft but then after one layer of leaf it's solid undamaged material a little bit damaged on the left there but generally healthy so that should come through okay with most of the stem intact as this dries out now that it's in the open we should find that this stiffens up and this kind of soft dead material stuff that isn't really rotten will actually get a bit crispier and add a bit of protection for it this one here again it looks really bad but it's actually it's actually firm even at the top so if i peel this back i suspect that there will be a healthy growing point in there somewhere so looking down you can see there we are you can see how far the frost has gone and then we got a healthy leaf at that point there so this top half of the leaf is probably dead but we got some healthier growth down there looking down here this is one that's particularly deep with the mulch you can actually a lot of the mycorrhizal fungi down there i did scatter this whole bed with mycorrhizal fungi so that will be helping the plants because the mycorrhizal fungi helps break down the organic organic content and links in with the roots now this one here is is one of the ones that started to put up some little pups you can see one down here fortunately most of that pop seems to have gone to mush but i'm hoping further down that pops all right and that should come up there is a little bit of kind of bright green right in the middle of the uh of the pup there so hopefully that will come through okay you can just see at that point so this one's not too bad it's really solid stem actually more solid than the rest so out of them all this one is probably the one that has survived winter the best with the least amount of damage and then this one over here is the one that i've uncovered previously the other ones will look like this soon where the outer layers dry up and it becomes a little bit more stable but this one feels good nice and solid it has pushed out a little bit of growth at the top the top growth is actually dead but further down it's alive and the livestock is pushing out the top so once that's warmed up again this should shoot off and then coming over to the Musa Bazoo the most hardy of the lot this here you can see it's got three pups the pups are actually looking pretty good you can see there's some green coming through same with that there so it definitely does seem to be hardier than the Caecumensis and that is what all the books say so this is the Musa Bazoo new growth coming through a lot of the old stem dying off but look at you can see there's nice healthy leaves starting to come out and we've got the three pups then the three pups all look nice and sturdy although they're looking blackened there's new growth coming through so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to just rake over the bed the the places where there's loads of leaves that's some insulation for the the hardy gingers the Hedichium gingers that I've got there or Hedichiums different ways of pronouncing it I'm going to rake that up and I'm just going to more evenly distribute the mulch to make sure that the soil can heat up a bit better and then we've also got my this was massive probably about three meters tall last year this trunk is absolutely solid as well it could be had a lot of wind it kind of strengthened up so you can see at the base there it's huge I'm six foot five so my hands are actually quite large so for comparison it probably doesn't look that big but it is an absolute monster trunk unfortunately the whole trunk seems to have died even though it was mulched to about this height here and covered it a few weeks ago just trying to get a bit of heat back into the ground but there's absolutely no sign of this did grow really fast last year even in cooler temperatures so I'm hoping this has survived if it hasn't I have got some cuttings inside that I took just in case this wouldn't survive but it feels really solid so I'm quite hopeful that there is some life left in there so I'm just going to do the same with this rake away the excess mulch because this was almost two foot under with mulch and I'm going to then give it some hot water hopefully that will come into life pretty soon so that's about it for this section of the video I'm now going to fast forward a few weeks and show you the growth with the slightly warm weather and the hot water treatment and we'll see how nicely they start to come back into growth because that's always a concern with these although it looks like they've all survived until we get some good strong growth from them I won't know 100% if they are definitely going to come back and if they're going to come back with healthy strong growth or if it's going to be distorted and maybe some of the inner sections have gone rotten but we'll find out in a few weeks time and this should be looking a lot better by then so it's now two and a half months later and as you can see there's been a fantastic amount of growth in some of the plants now it was a very tricky two and a half months it's been incredibly windy the last few months and some of the bananas have really really suffered in fact there's one banana which has grown five leaves and every new leaf that came out was ripped off within one week of opening so that one's almost died I've actually transplanted it now the reason I've moved that one is because it's one of my secamentus bananas and they were all grown from seed and they all grew slightly different because they had slightly different genetics because they were seed grown and with that one it had very long petioles on the leaves so I can show you an example this one here you can see where the leaf comes out from the main stem there's quite a long bit of stem the same with with this one here well that bit of stem was about twice as long on this other variety of Musa secamentus that I had and every time the wind came the leaves would get ripped off now these ones have actually lost two or three leaves themselves these are the two Musa secamentus plants but they kept enough leaves that they kept growing whereas the other one really just suffered and started to die so I'll show you what that one looks like now but before I show you that this is what I've replaced it with which is a seed grown type of I think a Musa secamentus called Daz Giant this is supposed to be a similar level of hardiness maybe slightly larger leaves so it'll be interesting to see how that does that's a new one for this year and this is the Musa secamentus that I took out with the longer petioles as you can see all the leaves have been broken on it these were the leaves that grew this year they all just snapped off and shredded so they've really not done well and it's got weaker and weaker because every new leaf is put out it's just died before it's been able to get any photosynthesis and this is the last leaf which has kind of lost energy and started to die back and even the young pop out the bottom is also dying back so I think I might lose this I will see what happens maybe if we get some calm weather and there's enough leaf surface it might recover but I'm a bit worried that it's still rolled up the growth is starting to slow so this is probably not going to open without this being open there's not enough surface for photosynthesis so I think this plant unfortunately probably will die but that's why I planted lots of secamentus plants I want to see which banana is the hardiest and I've also grown lots of different other varieties of banana the idea is I find out the one that's best suited to my climate and I stick with those ones and the ones that aren't most suited either give away to friends or family or they just die because they don't like our climate so most of the other ones as I say did okay there was one which was the smaller one down here which actually the stem actually didn't look too bad in the last video update that one completely rotted off and died so I've replaced that with another seed grown variety this year again it's supposed to be a secamentus type banana but this one's called Helen's Hybrid and this one's supposed to have really nice purple color underneath the leaves you can see that there and the other thing that makes this stand out from the other secamentus is you get this kind of waxy bloom on the stem there which is a a nice kind of blue color that does rub off if you touch it but it has this nice kind of glaucus blue color on the stem this isn't sowing it too well because it has been so windy the leaves have been rubbing against it and it's kind of come off in places but it is sowing quite nicely in some of the newer growth and if we have some calmer weather later in the summer that should look quite good so that was a replacement as I say for the previous one the reason being that one actually although the stem looked okay at the beginning the stem actually completely rotted off and this is what is left of that most secamentus so the original stem was in the middle here that completely rotted off and snapped this is now a small pup which has come up from the side so the plant is a bit weaker it's a bit stunted but it's starting to regrow so maybe this type of most secamentus is less harder than the others it's a little bit hard to tell because that most secamentus was in a more contained insulated box with less ventilation so maybe it got too wet and humid and it rotted off over the winter and that's the reason why it's died so I will try growing this for another year see how it does but this most secamentus was always a bit smaller a bit more of a dwarf variety so I'm not super happy with the growth form of this so if this doesn't make it I'm not too I'm not too worried or I might even put this in another garden somewhere because at the moment this isn't my favorite form but of the other two secamentus plants these are looking really good this one is a little bit more wind damaged it's not looking like it's doing as well but the one at the back that's definitely my favorite so far I'll just see if I can get a better angle show you the leaves better so this one as you can see has very upright leaves the leaves are much longer quite large leaves as well what's also quite nice is a lot of the stem has grown and a lot of the old dead stem has fallen off so the stem is looking nice and clean now the rest of this dead material will probably fall off soon it'll have a nice clean green stem the leaves themselves although they're quite long I was a bit worried with the length of them they would just be snapped off and as you can see there is one hanging down there that snapped off previously so this has already lost a few leaves to the wind but although they're quite long leaves they do seem quite tough so this one is growing quite nicely quite happy with that one as I say this one as well is looking pretty good this one though and their baby is actually really really healthy really strong growth coming up on that big leaves as well and one of the nice things with this one is it's a bit like the heron's hybrid has a really nice kind of purple color underneath all the succulents have it to a degree but just some of them have it more than others but this one has that really nice kind of purple color so this is also a really nice variety the leaves on this one tend to be a bit wider and a bit shorter than the leaves on this mutant succulents as you can especially see of that leaf so this is doing well sending up a nice pop this one's also sending up pops but they're just very weak at the moment I think most of the growth is still focused on the top half and both of these have lost so many leaves over the summer so far with the wind that they're a little bit weak but we've had a heat wave last weekend where we had about 20 odd degrees and this weekend is supposed to be about 26 28 degrees celsius which is a lot hotter than the 18 that we normally get here in Scotland so it'll be interesting to see how these do they should really perk up and hopefully put on a decent amount of growth and the rest of the spring wasn't too bad we did have some slight late frost there wasn't particularly bad the frost and and when they did come the plants were still quite wrapped up with the small with the leaves they didn't really have their growth on yet so they didn't get damaged the main problem this year as I say has been the wind which has been almost relentless week after week it gusts up to 50 miles an hour so I'll show you the other bananas now that was all the C. commensus ones and the new varieties that I'm growing this year so in the back here we have the Musa Bazou I don't think this has lost a single leaf this year I don't think it's because it's more sheltered it is more sheltered now because this Enseti banana has got enormous but I think it's because it's just the variety so the Musa Bazou is the one I always expected to do best in my climate because it's more hardy at winter time although in the summer time I still don't know if I think C. commensus might have to grow better over the summer than Bazou in my climate because C. commensus may be used to cooler conditions in the summer whereas this is used to slightly warmer conditions in the summer although it can take a bit more frost in the winter time so this is doing really well I've actually already separated the largest pup so there's three remaining possibly four if you count the really small one right at the background right there and so this is doing well let's say the other pup was really quite large that's now been separated I'll probably keep that aside maybe plant it somewhere else but this is doing well quite a lot of leaf damage I'll probably remove this ugly leaf soon because it's not doing much but although the leaves have been shredded and damaged they haven't been snapped off so this has done much better with the strong winds and another plant that isn't in banana but I mentioned in the previous video is the tree dahlia here this never came back unfortunately it kept growing new shoots every two or three days there would be a new shoot that would come up but as soon as it appeared within 12 hours or so of me first seeing it it would just be cut off by something something's been nibbling it I don't know what it is but it just gets cut down every time so that's kind of lost energy now I think this will die off unfortunately but I have got cuttings from this from last summer so I'll keep those cuttings alive and I'll probably plant the cuttings out next summer so I'll have my tree dahlia again so now I'll go on and talk about my Asseti ventricosum plants the rest of the tropical bed there's lots of other interesting plants but this is really a banana update in this video so I will talk about them later on but what I will mention is all of the heady chemes came through fine so the Harley gingers you can see there's a few coming up here and a few at the end a bit of variance in how well they did this one is Telstar 4 the two on the right were the ones that kept in the ground the two on the left were the ones overwintered indoors and they've grown up just fine the other ginger is the heady cheme wardii which has done fantastic in fact this is the first flowers I've had and they smell absolutely fantastic really amazing scent now although this one has actually grown much better outside for me in the summertime especially last summer this did much better than than the Telstar 4 it seems like the winter hardiness it really didn't do that well it did survive the winter but it just hasn't really grown until the last month or so so all the growth you see now is the plant I overwintered and all this new growth you can see is all from the plant I overwintered so you can see how much it's sprouting this is just really two two stems it's got another four shoots coming up which are much bigger than the previous ones so that's doing really well it's been in slow growth not complete dormancy over winter and it's shooting up now but this was just a very small division of the main tubers most of the tubers probably something like 80% was left in the ground and all that's come up is this one small shoot from the original tubers I did check most of them were fine they were a bit a little bit damaged you can see them down here they're quite close to the surface but they're all still quite hard but it's just part of this one shoot it's now the middle of July and there's almost no growth at all so what I'll do next year is I will keep these inside so they won't go fully dormant it seems that although these do well in my cool climate over the summer and they grow quite well it's getting out of dormancy that it struggles with and if it's going to be this lake coming out of dormancy I'm going to have barely any growth over the summer so next year I'll be definitely digging this up keeping it growing over the winter and then just planting it out every year so I'll show you my Anceti Venticosum now these have been fantastic with the wind I don't think they've lost any leaves they have had some wind damage with the leaves being shredded a bit but generally the leaves are much tougher on these and the plants have done really well as you saw earlier on in the video the leaves are really quite small and stunted such as these ones here but once the plant got its roots down it's really starting to size up now and it's almost as big as it was at the end of last summer now you can see the stem is a bit smaller so this is the old stem and the new stem inside is definitely a bit narrower and some of the old stem is starting to die back but the leaves now are probably on par with how big they were last year and it's got so much leaf mass now that's going to have lots of area for absorbing sunlight it's going to put on some really rapid growth and so for the next month or two whilst we've still got some good growing conditions this is going to size up really nicely same with my other one as well they're going to grow really big and it'll be interesting to see how large they get this year I'll show you a picture of how these looked at this time last year just to give you an indication of how much more of the growing season is left and how the beginning of the season is quite slow for my Ancetis and it's towards the end they really start to take off once they get their roots established and they've got all that leaf mass for collecting all that solar energy so this is my other Ancetis ventricosum as you can see it's not looking quite as good the reason being this is a much more exposed site this is my front garden the wind really comes down from the south and the west over that direction even though there's a hedge there it just bows down the 50 mile an hour wind gusts were really quite damaging for this I don't think we lost any leaves but as you can see some of them were really badly shredded the plant was a little bit stressed as well you can see there's another leaf it's a bit shredded there also the ground here isn't quite as rich I've got this as a rose bed and a bedding border so the soil is very rich but not as rich as my tropical garden bed and just the extra exposed site I think it struggled a bit with the cooler weather at the beginning of the year but as you can see it's doing particularly well now we're getting some really nice large leaves on the plant they're starting to take off you can see that this trunk is much more than last year so you can see the thickness of last year's trunk it's all dying back and you've got this new kind of stem in the middle or trunk starting to regrow so it's going to be a bit smaller the stem but by the end of summer it will be bigger again and this one last year did tend to have bigger leaves than the other one you can see already we get some really big wide leaves absolutely enormous I also quite like this one because it has such a nice red stripe a bit more prominent than the other one and it has that nice kind of glaucus color in fact you can probably see that a bit better on some of the younger leaves here we've got that lovely kind of glaucus waxy coating and a really nice red stripe so this is quite a nice looking insetia ventricosum it'll be interesting to see how it does as I say it's just starting to get going it doesn't have as many leaves but it's a much sunnier site this so once the weather warms up and we have calmer weather this one might actually do better than the other one if it needs that sunlight if it's more to do with the ground conditions then maybe the other one will grow better but it'll be interesting to see how they do I'm expecting these to get really quite large by the end of the summer so that's all for now I'm quite happy with how the bananas have overwintered my first year overwintering them minus six wasn't too hard for them last year but I did have them well insulated so that certainly helped Musa Bazoo as I said previously wasn't really insulated it was just mulched so I'm quite happy with how they've done I'll give you guys an update at the end of the summer and show you how they're doing and I'll also give you an update in a few weeks time probably just a general tour of my tropical garden to show you all the other plants because there's lots of other interesting plants I have growing here and quite a few new additions so that's all for this video update I'll see you guys in a few weeks or months time when I have another tropical garden update that's all for the banana plants