So we finally harvested our first banana bunch back at the end of January.
This particular bunch didn’t receive any special treatment at all. No frost protection, no artificial fertilizers or sprays (just mulch, chop and drop, household compost, occasional horse poo bag), and we didn’t bag the fruit either (helps prevent damage to the fruit from sun, cold and birds). We wanted to set a benchmark for what an outdoor grown banana bunch would look like in coastal Buller, with just good site selection (sheltered from wind and full day sun from mid-morning onwards) and well prepared soil.
There’s plenty of improvements we will try next time, such as we have barrels of fermented weeds up next to the banana patch that we can pour on during dry weeks (last year we missed a lot of good growing weather because we couldn’t easily water the bananas up there). Already I can tell this fermented weed tea has made the banana patch grow almost twice as fast. Similarly we will try with a banana bag as well to see how that affects the fruit.
The banana patch was was planted in late 2020, and are NZ Misi Luki variety.
I think the flower formed about last May or so, so about 8 months or so to ripen. Some of the bananas are cracked (they were still half edible), but most fruit are in good shape.
The fruits when they ripened were sweet (although not as sweet as other New Zealand bananas we’ve tried) and had a very dense texture, more so than other New Zealand grown bananas I’ve tasted. Crucially, there was no woody core (the inside of the fruit goes hard like a stick), which was something we were concerned about as cold weather is generally considered a risk factor.
