Growing Bananas (Musa Spp.)

How To Grow Banana Plants And Keep Them Happy


Banana plants can offer many benefits:

  • They make great windbreaks or screens,
  • the leaves can be fed to horses, cows and other grazers,
  • the dried remains of the trunks can be used for weaving baskets and mats.

Oh, and they give you bananas. Lots of bananas!

Growing Bananas25 kg of bananas in the making.


Banana plants like:

  • Rich, dark, fertile soils.
  • Lots of mulch and organic matter. LOTS. Just keep piling it on.
  • Lot of nitrogen and potassium. (Chicken manure!)
  • Steady moisture, in the ground and in the air.

Banana plants dislike:

  • Strong winds.
  • Extreme heat or cold.
  • Being hungry or thirsty.
  • Being alone and exposed.

More detail on all that below.

Banana Varieties

Cavendish is the variety that you know from the supermarket. If you live near a banana growing region, this is the variety you see in the plantations. It is a stout plant that produces large heavy bunches.

Lady Fingers are very tall and slender plants and have smaller, sweeter fruit. They are often grown by gardeners as ornamental plants with the small fruit being a bonus.


There are many other exotic varieties, but those above are the most popular and most commonly grown.

What I describe below and most of the pictures on this page refer to Cavendish bananas but the advice applies to all other varieties as well.

How Do Bananas Grow?

Bananas are not real trees, not even palm trees, even though they are often called banana palms. Bananas are perennial herbs.



A growing banana flower.


A banana plant takes about 9 months to grow up and produce a bunch of bananas. Then the mother plant dies. But around the base of it are many suckers or pups, little baby plants.

Banana suckers growing at base of plant.

At the base of a banana plant, under the ground, is a big rhizome called the corm.

The rhizome has many growing points and those turn into new suckers/pups. The suckers can be taken off and transplanted, and one or two can be left in position to replace the mother plant.


How To Get Started Growing Bananas

First you need to make sure that you can in fact grow bananas where you are.


If the temperatures drop any lower the fruit suffers, the skin turns greyish and the leaves can turn yellow. Frost kills the plant above ground, but the corm can survive and may re-shoot.

The ideal temperature range for banana growing is around 26-30°C (78-86°F).

You need a lot of water to grow bananas. The huge soft leaves evaporate a lot and you have to keep up the supply. Bananas also need high humidity to be happy.


You need very rich soil. If you don't have good soil to start with, make some. Incorporate lots and lots of compost and plenty of chicken manure before you plant your bananas. Wood ash for extra potassium doesn't hurt either. Then mulch them very thickly. And keep mulching and feeding them!

And you need room so you can plant enough of them together. Bananas need shelter from wind. Growing many banana plants together increases the humidity in the middle, evens out temperature changes a bit, and it shades and cools the trunks. You don't want to cook the flower that's forming in the middle...

If you get a chance, look at a commercial banana plantation somewhere. The outside rows, especially the western side, always look sad. The best bananas grow on the inside.


(Now, please don't send me any more emails letting me know that you are successfully growing a solitary banana plant in a tub on your patio or in your greenhouse or wherever. This is a permaculture site. We are not talking about keeping plants alive outside their natural growing conditions. We are growing food.

Planting Bananas

You can not grow the usual bananas from seeds. These banana plants don't produce viable seeds like wild bananas do.

The best way is to start with the above mentioned suckers or pups. Know someone who grows bananas? Talk to them. Every banana plant produces a lot more suckers than you need, so people usually have plenty to give away.

Only take suckers from vigorous banana plants. The suckers should have small, spear shaped leaves and ideally be about four feet high. Smaller suckers will take longer to fruit and the first banana bunch will be smaller.



Another option is to dig up a bit of the rhizome and chop it into bits. Every bit that has an eye can be planted and will grow into a banana plant. But it takes longer than growing banana suckers.


The spacing depends on your layout. My bananas grow in a block of several double rows. Within the double rows the spacing is two to three metres, now with two plants in each position, suckers of the initial plant. My double rows are four to five metres apart.

I also have a banana circle around an outdoor shower with two metres at the most between individual plants, and they are growing in a haphazard way.

Keep your banana plants moist but not too wet in the early days or they may rot. They don't have leaves yet to evaporate water, so they don't need a lot of it.

Maintaining Your Banana Patch

The most common cause for not getting fruit is starvation.
Banana plants blow over in strong winds.



You get bigger fruit if you remove all unwanted suckers, only keeping the best one.
After the initial planting you can leave two on healthy, vigorous plants. Beyond that it is better to keep one sucker per plant on average. Otherwise your patch will become too crowded.


A healthy banana sucker or pup.




You just need to sprinkle on some fertiliser every now and then, to replace what you took out of the system when you took the bananas. Bananas are high in potassium, so ideally the fertiliser should be, too. Keep the fertiliser close to the trunk as bananas don't have big root systems.

Growing Banana Fruit




Male fingers on a growing banana bunch.


A young banana bunch, all hands exposed.

Some people break off the "bell" (the bunch of purple flower petals at the end) about 15 cm below the last female hand. That way the banana plant puts its energy and reserves into growing big bananas, and not into growing a long stalk. Commercial banana growers also remove some of the bottom female hands, so the remaining bananas grow bigger.




If your banana plant is not very strong or not very straight you may have to prop your banana bunch, because it becomes very heavy, and a bunch can snap off or pull the whole plant over.

Collapsed banana plant.


Bananas are ready to be picked when they look well rounded with ribs, and the little flowers at the end are dry and rub off easily. You can pick them now, green, and they will start ripening as soon as you pick them, no matter their size.

They will eventually ripen on the bunch, too, and those bananas taste the best. But once they start they ripen very quickly, faster than you can eat or use them. So you may as well cut the top hands off a bit earlier and ripen them on the kitchen bench.




The mystery of the missing banana bunch

by reader Glenn Baxter

"We grow some Cavendish bananas in a small area in the back garden and the biggest plant eventually produced a good-sized bunch of bananas.
The bunch was nearly ready to pick when all the hands disappeared off the main stalk. There were no skins or any bits of fruit left on the ground.

We suspected that someone had stolen them until we looked closer on the ground under the bare stalk...
There was a small mound of kanagaroo poo!

We didn't believe that the roos would eat bananas, until my wife was approached by one while she was eating a banana. She offered some to the roo who eagerly ate it and was looking for more. So there you go."

The banana thief: an Eastern Grey kangaroo.The banana thief!    © Photo: Glenn Baxter



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