DON'T Grow BANANA Plants Until You WATCH THIS!

if you're thinking about growing bananas don't get the tall variety because I'll tell you from experience it literally drive you bananas g'day I'm Mark from self-sufficiently and in this video I'm going to show you how we turned an area that was becoming completely useless overrun by tall banana plants into a workable area like this with a bunch of beautiful raised garden beds so that we can plant more and grow more let's get into it [Music] you know 10 years ago didn't worry me so much because I was a little bit more agile than I am now I'd climb up a double step ladder and bag the fruit because you have to bag the fruit I mean we love bananas it's one of our most popular fruits in the world isn't it they taste fantastic and everything else wants to eat them too we've got flying mammals here called Flying foxes and we've got possums and birds and all of them love chewing on ripe bananas even green ones so you have to bag the fruit otherwise you'll get none and in the end the biggest problem for me was actually getting up the ladders and bagging the fruit I found that it was too much of a chore it was too dangerous and I'd had enough of it and all that was happening was the banana plants were growing like crazy attracting all the wildlife which I don't mind so much but they weren't adding value to our food Garden I mean I guess you could probably employ someone or get someone younger to climb up the trees and do all that stuff if you're retired and I don't know got plenty of money but I did try that and unfortunately I had to fire the young fella because well he kept on throwing the bent bananas away but thankfully we don't have to go without growing bananas or eating bananas growing in our own backyard because of banana technology in this last decade I'm not talking about our economy or Australia being a Banana Republic I'm talking about the way that you can grow dwarf bananas now and not just dwarf varieties that don't grow near as high as those tall ones but also super dwarfs that only grow about six foot high now I'm looking forward to testing them out I've got two plants I've already turned two into three and I'm growing them in containers I'm yet to get any fruit off them but I tell you what when I do I'll be bringing you that video that'll be cute as the point is growing dwarf or smaller varieties of bananas are not only good for smaller spaces backyards or even now container gardens they are also so much easier to handle and safer and of course easier to protect from pests animals and to a large extent disease because a lot of these varieties aren't as disease acceptable as other commercial varieties can be stop moving around I'm getting dizzy anyway to clear this area I thought about doing it on my own but it was going to take me blooming weeks and I just didn't have the energy at this point in time so I decided to get a digger operator in Maddie and he'd done a fantastic job not only leveling this out but he actually dug out all the roots as well so that you wouldn't have banana plants growing back up through the raised beds and they will do it if you keep cutting them back they eventually die but the last thing I wanted was all the banana plants continually reshooting it's just extra work that I didn't need the raised beds it's pretty interesting actually because one of them is a test bed from birdies now birdies it's not a sponsor this isn't a sponsored video but you should know that I am affiliatized with them meaning that you know if you use my code down in the description below you'll get a discount and I also get a small Kickback so you should know that but all these beds are birdies this one here is a designer range birdies bed it's got the square back and the metal posts so it's a little bit sort of more up Market I guess and then these ones here have to be one of my favorite are just the round ones they're about a meter across or three feet across 70 or so centimeters high and I just love them because you can grow so much in such a small space they are so strong they're just easy to work with easy to walk around easy to weed and I don't know for some reason I just like the look of them as well and on my left here I've got an oblong birdies bed with the rounded Corners excellent size for even a small courtyard and then you can see this big long one here well this is a test bed that I'm doing specifically for the hugel culture type guys out there like myself who like to fill these beds with a lot of organic matter in the base like logs even sticks leaves mulch whatever you've got lying around so it creates that medieval way of growing food that is so helpful and good for your plants and in this bed here we chucked most of the banana tree waste into the base almost three quarters of the way up that was quite a task because the banana trees and the stumps particularly were pretty heavy so we had to make sure that it wasn't damaging the bed as we were putting it in or putting too much pressure on the structure especially the internal structure to prevent the bed from bowing out and I'm expecting that soil and everything to sink quite quickly and that's the experiment that I'm using to see how well this bed performs with that type of gardening technique in and growing in raised beds if I was to fill these beds up by myself with a wheelbarrow cutting the soil from the front to the back here oregano would have taken me about two hours per bed and I've done that I've done that for most of our garden but this time I just thought why not use the machinery and that's the smart move so we could do one of these beds in probably 15 minutes but we did them one by one so that we could get the machine in of course otherwise it would have been too hard to put all the garden beds in and then try to swing that Digger around and fill up the beds these beds were mainly filled in the base with rubbish soil that we had left over from our Renovations and the Landscaping out the front of our place or fill if you want to call it that pretty bad fill but we put that in the base until it was all gone on these main round garden beds that way they wouldn't sink as much so I stamped them down making sure that the beds were nice necessarily settled so that was less sinkage because in these beds here I might plant some small fruiting shrubs like raspberries or native raspberries like the Atherton raspberry and so I don't want them sinking too much so it's good to have that compacted soil in the base to get rid of it as well as using it for a good purpose recycling that soil [Laughter] you'll notice that when we filled it with the fill soil in the base two bucket loads just to fill it about halfway up I stamped it down I got in the bed and I stamped it down because I want to limit the sinkage but when it comes to the topsoil we've got two loads of topsoil you can see that first load I pushed down to my hands I just want to compact it a little bit but not too much because you don't want the plants to be suffocated you want nice loose topsoil for veggie gardening and fruit trees and at least initially and that way you get those veggies growing their Roots down nice and easy at the same time they get nice a lot of oxygen and nutrients to the to the roots so that's why I don't want to compact it too much on top I'll just put a bit of light pressure on that last bucket goes on top I don't compact it down much at all I just level it off add a bit of maybe compost to it and a little bit of fertilizer later and some Mulch on top and Bob's your auntie this last oval bed here that creates this kind of Corner in the back of our veggie garden we filled it with waste soil as well in the bottom sort of third to a half and then the rest of it was good premium soil from our local landscaping supplies company and I tell you what I'm very happy with the quality of this soil it's got an excellent mixture of organic and non-organic and from experience it's fantastic to grow in and then finally this designer bed here I also wanted to finish off the banana waste in here and then we topped again with the premium soil mix and the leftover banana waste well I threw it in our first compost bait here it'll take a while but over time this will compact down and compost down then I'll turn it into that second Bay where we'll end up turning it into a wonderful dark compost that can go into these newly raised garden beds I suspect and in this space here you can see how it's sort of left vacant I got Maddy to level it off a bit but at the end of the day I was thinking of putting more race garden beds in here but now I'm thinking maybe we just leave this space open I quite like it just an open area I don't know I can grab extra Garden waste and put it here if I need to or put some potted plants here if I need to like as a temporary thing or I might even build a small little hot house or Greenhouse or a netted covered area who knows whatever I just think I I might just leave it vacant for now and see how it goes it's just a good access area on the way to the compost base even just for that well I hope you enjoyed this video if you did make sure you give it a big banana bent banana thumbs up and share it around because that really helps my channel out heaps and also subscribe if you haven't already if you're lurking around and you're watching these videos and you're not subscribing subscribe hit that Bell and get notifications and that way you'll see all of my content and just remember if you're going to get bananas don't get the big ones unless you're young and fit and really love climbing banana plants thanks a lot for watching bye for now cheers

Channel: Self Sufficient Me

Views: 147,074

Keywords: how to grow bananas, banana plant, growing bananas, banana tree, growing banana trees, how to, gardening tips, banana tree care, how to grow banana tree at home, how to grow banana tree in pot, fruit trees, banana planting methods, banana growing tips, banana trees, banana tips, how to grow banana plant, how to grow bananas at home, gardening, garden, homesteading

Id: zE6eXM44I08

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 16 2023