Thought some of you may enjoy seeing a pic of my little TN citrus greenhouse. Mostly various citrus, a couple of banana plants, and, in the very back, pomegranates and fig plants. It’s about at capacity, but I just can’t stop adding to it! Starting papaya seeds soon, dragon fruit, and guava!
It’s an incurable disease.
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That it is, Richard. But if I’m going to have a disease, then this is the kind I want! 
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How do you handle that come summer??? Everything goes outside? Tenn seems like a really good place to garden…super long growing seasons, lots of rain/humidity and mild winters… I suppose the 8lb bugs can be an issue?
I’d imagine you can fruit bananas down there?
Climate is no limitation to growing bananas to maturity … But money and resources are. I have a former customer who fruits bananas entirely indoors in Nome, AK.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s Tennessee, not Tampa lol. I’m in a 9B climate and fruiting banana’s are a challenge here. Unless as Richard said they are taking measures to grow them indoors.
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When I got married in Illinois it was January and brutally cold. We headed to Miami for our honeymoon. We thought sure by the time we got to TN it would be balmy. Ha it was still zero when we got there. OK it will be balmy by the time we hit FL, ha ha again. We finally got to Homestead south of Miami and found their sweetcorn crop frozen.
I guess you could say it always looks balmier on the other side of the fence.
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warm, yes, all the plants come out once the weather warms up. TN can be good for gardening, but we have a lot of disease pressure. Winters can get pretty cold. It’s been mild this winter, but we can occasionally dip into the single digits, and on rare instances, below zero. We rarely have any snow cover, though. Just the cold. Bananas will freeze to the ground. The “cold hardy” types can regrow, but you’d never get any fruit by growing them outside. My bananas have survived the last two winters in the greenhouse, but no fruit yet.
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Yes, your 9B is much different from the 9B I had out here in Rancho Penasquitos.
That’s a normal experience for folks growing bananas outdoors in the summer and then indoors with a minimum of supplemental light. For those growers, 3-5 years to fruit is commonly reported. To improve this would be a serious upswing in electric costs: about 1200 gross Watts worth of 6500 Kelvin fluorescent bulbs overhead, on 12 hours per day.
He’s actually zone 7 (Tenn) based on profile.
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Yes, zone 7.
Richard, that makes sense. My plants are Veinte Cohol, which are supposed to fruit very quickly. Maybe this will be the year.
One of the plants sent up a bunch of pups, so maybe I’ll offer them up if anyone wants some. They are somewhat hard to find.
If grown under tropical conditions with no interruptions. Outside of those conditions (e.g., zone 10b) it matures somewhat slower than others; e.g., Namwa.
I don’t recommend them. The flavor is no better than Orinoco.
No loss when they’re being offered for free.
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I wouldn’t grow them or Orinoco even if they were free!
Compared to Wisconsin, Tennessee is the tropics.
My avg temp in this Jan so far is 23.6F…Nashville, TN is sitting at 47.5F and Miami, FL 74F (<----to put that in perspective my avg temp this past July was 75F).
…i Just went 8 days with NO sunshine (it came out yesterday afternoon for about 4 hours) so a winter greenhouse up here is almost pointless without grow lights. We have gone as long as 20 days in December with no sun. By late Feb a greenhouse makes much more sense with the climbing sun/much longer days.
I thought I read that Gros Michel is like the best tasting banana—used to be the only variety you could get back in the day before diseases took them out.
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I’m growing it. The taste is very good. I’d say it is the best tasting banana fruit ever offered in retail stores in the U.S. until the recent influx of alternate banana and plantain fruits from Central and South America.