Posted by teleforce 1 day ago
Wong, 45, has presented for BBC series' Grow Your Own Drugs and Secrets of Your Food.
Curious what is the latest on genetic improvement of banana against Panama disease ?
Winters are too cold for them here. So either you heavily mulch them and they start from the roots every spring while the stems die in winter. Or you learn how to wrap the stems to protect them over winter.
It might be possible, or borderline to keep them unprotected within London but outside of there and inland temperatures can drop below -5C even in the South.
On the other hand, I think they have started growing tropical fruits like mangos and bananas in Sicily.
When I used to eat banana-flavored things (milkshakes, chocolate bars, etc), I always thought that the flavor was artifically inflated and tasted nothing like an actual banana...
...until I went to Fiji. Externally, the appearance of the banana would probably render it as waste in Western countries as it doesn't look nice and yellow - and looks close to what an overripe/rotten banana looks like, but gosh they tasted amazing!
An incredibly dystopian way to minimise human-caused climate change and potential extinction for yet more species.
According to Gemini, lots of untrue things are true.
More useful to look at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/World_Ha... and see if that makes more sense, although seemingly it's changing a bit and that graphic is quite old by now (2012). A plant's survival depends on more than just its hardiness and what zone it's in of course, but it's a useful starting point.
And according to science Fribourg offers more growing degree days
https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/45015~56049/Comparison-of...
Unlikely
> I saw a banana tree with green bananas in Switzerland
1) I believe you. This is not rare. Culturing a banana tree is super easy.
You can easily find one ornamental dwarf banana for your office in Zurich, put it outside in summer and enjoy the sight of the little green bananas. You just need lots of water, a decent sized pot (bananas can produce fruit in pots), some manure and a summer hot. All of this can be found in Switzerland.
Just don't expect fruit.
2) Growing bananas to their harvest time is the impossible part.
Flowers need to mature all winter long, and if they touch just a little chill, commercial banana fruits will stop growing, the stems will wither and collapse to the ground. They need more than 12 months of non-stop warm temperatures to became yellow and tasty. Your banana tree should be treated as an annual herb or kept indoors for many months each year.
But, there are more in this history.
There are around 50 species of banana trees. And lots of hybrids. There are yellow bananas, green bananas, lipstick pink bananas and steel blue bananas.
Some species evolved in mountains of tropical areas. Basically a temperate climate. The trunks that support the fruits can stand much more cold without dying. The problem is that they have small short bluish green bananas that don't worth the effort.
So far, those species are collector oddities or kept for hybridization purposes; but everybody in the field would salivate about breeding a seedless banana of decent quality that stands cold. This creatures are very productive.
They're more like pets in this sense. Really fun plants to have inside though.
