HOW TO GROW BANANAS

[Music] the banana delicious and that translated means fruit for wise men thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] good everyone and welcome back to the weedy Garden can you hear the difference that's a nice sound that's the sound I hear up in the wheelie Garden and when I did my first video I specifically said that they're not how-to videos all right and because at that point I didn't really know how to garden they were more like inspirational videos to share my inspiration and to share my enthusiasm about gardening at that point I didn't know how to garden and that's been the Journey of the weedy garden and I'm glad that I've been able to share it with you two three years down the track uh actually three years after planning my first little banana tree I'm sitting in a like a banana jungle up in the weedy garden and so this video is about how to grow bananas and how to successfully grow bananas because what I've learned the last three years I've put into my bananas and you can see they're beautiful bananas I'm getting out of the weedy Garden they love compost they love to eat right they're very hungry plants and they're very thirsty as well so lots of water and lots of food to start them off then you're going to have good bananas already right there bananas they like the subtropics and they like the tropics all right so oh ah they eat mosquitoes if you ever get bitten by mosquito and you've got a banana peel handy well then just rip off the side there like that and take the inside of it and then just rub it there where you get a bit more in the mosquito that's better and it works all right so if you're living in Denmark where I've been living for a long time where it gets frozen or anywhere in northern hemisphere or anywhere too far south it's going to get too cold for the bananas all right so if you're in an arid place where there's not a lot of water around you're probably not going to get the best bananas either so like a nice wet subtropical climate is what bananas love I don't know you don't want to put them on a hill like I did because they kind of get wind blasted and uh they all the leaves break but they're still getting their photosynthesis in fact a banana can get its photosynthesis all the way down through the trunk because the trunk is actually just made up of the leaves okay and there's lots of special things about bananas in this video I'm going to share all the special things I know about bananas so first of all bananas they're not a tree all right they're more like a herb or grass [Music] and um just taking a nice big breath here taking it all in bananas are not fruit they're Berry well I do have tiny miniature little soft seeds they're not fertile they're sterile so you can't grow a banana plant from banana seed you need to have a little pup as the plant's growing is spreading its roots out and then from The Roots it pops out little pups it's like little extensions and you can actually guide your bananas around the hill because you can choose the little pups that you want to take away and leave the little pups that you want to grow and you can travel with your bananas all around the garden if you want it so I want my bananas to travel up and down in this I don't want them to grow out into the swales so I have to walk around them and everything so I'm keeping them in here and I do that by chopping the pumps out they're coming out the wrong direction but you want to save some of the pumps as well because in a healthy little banana family you've got four generations are bananas so the best way to grow bananas to spread the energy through the plant is that four generations you've got grandmother and she's fruiting at the moment let's see out there and then you've got her daughter which is that one behind there in there and that one's going to go to flower soon and then you've got her daughter which is this one here that's going to be a while before that goes to flower and then you've got one here which is the granddaughter or the great granddaughter and she'll be flowering in about a year and a half so any other puppies that come you have to chop them out you can see these little ones here coming up I have to chop them out when they get a bit bigger you can see these holes that are left here they're the ones that I've chopped out already there's a little technique that I do to do that so they don't keep growing up it is that when you chop them you put a stick down the middle of it [Music] then you get a teaspoon full of kerosene or diesel and just pour it down the hole that'll prevent it from continuing to grow so you can control your puppies so you've just got the four generations so that means the great grandmother she can put all her energy into creating a big beautiful bananas and then when she's done we've got to chop that tree out because once they've flowered and fruited they won't do anymore they won't flower again and then you can chop it up and feed it back on the banana plant itself again you know what I reckon the worms that love this so I might just give I might just go and give some of the worms the worms will love the banana leaves and the banana pups the chop out there you're not going to replant as well anything from the banana plant the worms will eat gives me a high Rich potassium fertilizer for the garden which is good for all your fruiting stuff and all your flowering stuff and all your root vegetables and they also make really good compost as well see banana trees are big eaters that means they eat a lot of food just throw a banana tree in the ground it's probably not going to do too well you need to feed it and so when you're trimming the leaves off the plants as they're growing I always just chop them up and put them back on the pile underneath the tree chop it over so it breaks down a bit quicker but then you just end up getting a nice big soft Mochi bottom here where the roots find their way through it's called chopping and dropping and I like a lot of manure as well so if you've got any manure around your place just put it on the bananas they love it you get big bananas every time you trim a leaf we'll chop down a great grandmother banana tree which I'll tell you about in just a second just put the bananas back on themselves so you make a pile you can just feel it all decomposing underneath here so by chopping up all this organic material The Roots will come up and eat it as it's decomposing so in a sense the bananas are eating themselves let's see see after after some time as this is breaking down the Banana Tree starts to just grow through it see the banana trees finding its way through all this organic matter here look at that beautiful big banana root see how it's growing down through here there's a little pup coming up there all right first you get your banana pup it looks pretty big it's actually quite a big one this one I'm going to see if I can get this one out so you just got to put your shovel in behind it here like this okay I'm gonna try and just start hitting this see if I can cut it off you get your shovel on the inside between the mother tree and the pup and you just hammer it down into the ground you give it a little wiggle and you'll feel it'll come loose it'll break loose from the mother plant and you just carefully pull it out so you don't pull all the roots out but it can sort of manage if it's got a few little Roots sticking out see there we go that's what we want and you want to find a nice Sunny Spot in your garden where it's not too windy where it's going to get a lot of water a lot of sunshine nicely protected and dig a nicely hole for it and you feel that big hole with beautiful compost that you made so this compost I've worked on the garden I've made is saw those compachies the 21 Day compost it's leaves there's grass clippings there's pressure dust and and charcoals beautiful soil it's kind of just like what you'd imagine of forest to be that's been there for a while all sorts of waste and cow manure and dead cane toads and stuff so we'll take this little banana pop out here and put them down the bottom of the hole there like that it's pretty simple doing this right nice hole bit of compost basically that's how you do the the planning of the pub with good soil [Music] I like these tied to wharf bananas because they're easy for me to harvest because I'm a soul is a tree it's easy to get up and I feel like the king of the jungle yeah see compared to these ones this is my ladyfinger bananas they're a lot taller and I need a ladder to get up this one's flowering right now it's me which is nice so I might keep those and get rid of these to make life easier for me but I'll just wait and see what these tastes like first the ladyfinger bananas they're pretty tall and quite hard to get up with the ladder but I have made a system I'll show you had a bag the bananas when they're too high [Music] yes so why do I bag bananas I bagged bananas because the bats will get them or the parrots will get them King parrots love eating my bananas so if you've got some banana trees that are really high and you don't want to climb up the ladder because it's a bit unsafe and it's a bit scary because it's all on the slope and it's like how do you get up and put your bag on your bananas well I figured out a way to do it one of my friends told me a way to do it with this ring that makes it easier but if you can't stand up on a ladder and put it on you can get a long stick and you can put a long stick on it and all you need is a chaff bag a bit of wire and a bit of string and a long stick and a bit of gaffer tape all right this is their bamboo Pole and I'm lucky because I've got a bamboo grain next door to me and then I've tied the wire because I you need to have a kind of pretty stiff wire this wire wasn't strong enough so I've doubled it over and then I've Twisted it around so it's strong you want it strong here two strains going all the way around and then I've Twisted it around here so it's strong here and I put all these in the hole at the end what and then just to make it a bit stronger I'm going to put a bit of gaffer tape because when I pull it I don't want it to come off around here hold it on okay like that okay and then you just have to cut off the end of it here so we need to make the bag like Hollow and then you get your chart bag all right you've got your Char bag and you put some holes in it like that and then we're going to put your string on the end like that and you tie it through that one of the holes and you tie it on the bag like that and then you put it in and out and in and out and in and out and so on and get back through the same hole again and then you put your bag inside your ring you fold the ends of the bag down with the string around your reel you pull the string a little bit tight so it sort of doesn't come up and you hold the string you let the string come down the pole and you've got your neck like that it's like a huge big butterfly net it's like a banana net we're gonna go and catch some bananas so here we go see okay and then I just put it up around the bananas I feel safe now it's pretty easy did you know that a um a bunch of bananas is not called a bunch of bananas it's called a cluster of bananas and on a cluster of bananas there's probably about 200 bananas and um all these Bunches of bananas on the cluster of bananas is not called a bunch of bananas either that's called a hand of bananas and this is not called a banana that's called a finger that's what I say so when do you know when to harvest the bananas well when they start off the little bananas are sort of square they've got little sharp edges on them and as they mature they they sort of blow up like a balloon then they're ready to harvest when I want to harvest the bananas it's a bit tricky because how do you climb up a ladder and hang on to a big bunch of bananas that weighs maybe 40 kilos and chop it off and get covered in banana juice and rickety on your ladder and it's like life-threatening for a bunch of bananas alrighty so I'm going to attempt to take this big banana cluster down now and uh I've got my elastic Road and my ladder and my knife see how we go okay so I've got to take one more Step Up in bed rickety okay that was not easy but it's doable now just loosen my rope here and I should be able to just lower my bananas down [Applause] I'm gonna go see how we do it and now to chop down the tree yeah yeah I harvest them all that green so I can let them ripen down by my house and then I can take the right ones off the cluster one at a time as they ripen so to help the bananas ripen quickly just get a banana that's already ripe and um appeal sometimes but it's in bed time the gases will come out and it'll help look how this just ripens looks amazing a little Rainbow of green and yellows foreign did you also know that the monkeys they open the banana from this side not that side because it's obvious because they're hanging on the tree and they can't open it from that end right so they do they're used to opening it from that because they call up and open it but I found out actually after doing that and after finding out that that I started opening them up from this end it's a lot easier and then you've got this little stump to hang on to and it's like a nice little banana lollipop and everything's good another interesting thing is did you know that bananas actually Radioactive bananas are radioactive poison but you have to eat about 10 million of them to get radioactive poisoning who's gonna do that so just eat as many bananas as you want because they've got tryptophan in them it's like a protein in a banana and that your body converts it to serotonin we know what serotonin is serotonin is that happy chemical that makes you have the feel-good factor right okay so when you eat bananas I guess you're happy I'm happy about that eating bananas like this get yourself a little block of land and grow some bananas and become wise men and women and children I'm just going to wish you a happy day hope you can go bananas wonderful Yellow clean organic bananas delicious so I hope you enjoyed the video I hope you learned something um have a nice day and I'll catch you later [Music]

Channel: The Weedy Garden

Views: 126,876

Keywords: banana, permaculture, organic, sustainable, gardening tips, grdening, how to garden, how to grow bananas, growing food, off grid living, off the grid, food forest, vegetable gardens, veggie garden, country living, sustainable living, agriculture, farming, harvesting, nature, gardens, selfsufficient, organics, plantation, banana plantation, survival, photographer, happiness economy

Id: 1v0IuePhp04

Length: 19min 27sec (1167 seconds)

Published: Sat May 13 2023