Yes, bananas grow well in greenhouses. Most banana researchers start their plants there, Iceland – which generates all of its energy geothermally – is aiming toward growing its entire national banana supply indoors. (See this posting on my blog: http://www.bananabook.org/discovolonte/2009/04/latest-banana-growing-nations-iceland-and-greenland.html.

Of course, we’ve got the issue of how much energy a greenhouse consumes. But if you’ve got a personal facility, you can produce some very special and delicious varieties. The forums at http://www.bananas.org are filled with enthusiastic, smart banana hobbyists who can point you in the right direction.

@Kim

Despite the warnings in the old Chiquita jingle – “never in the refrigerator” – you can keep your bananas fresh a few days longer by chilling them. The skins will turn brown, but the edible flesh will remain good.

Other ripeness cycle suggestions:

- To make the fruit turn yellow quicker, put the green bunch in a heavy paper bag with an overripe apple, melon, plum or peach. The natural gasses given off by the non-bananas will act as a signal for the bananas to ripen.

- If you haven’t finished a bunch by the time they turn brown and mushy, freeze them and use them for banana bread. Slightly overripe bananas also make a pretty good substitute for eggs in vegan baking. One fruit per egg usually does it, though your mileage may vary.

- Dan

Dan Koeppel’s last blog post..Video Review: Pudding Dreams. Shattered.

I’m the author of “Banana.” Thanks for the opportunity to answer your questions.

@summer: absolutely. In fact, if you go for a walk, you will see banana trees nearly everywhere (in my neighborhood, Silver Lake, I counted over 100 on a four or five mile tour.) They’re easy to recognize, once you know what they look like: broad green leaves, somewhat surfboard sized and shaped, usually semi-erect, with brown dead leaves sometimes hanging down. The stem (or what you might consider the trunk) of the fruit is sheathed, with segments growing from within each other, up to the leaves, and is usually dark, or even reddish, in places.

It is extremely easy to grow banana plants. They are low maintenance and make wonderful shade. All you have to do is plant what’s called a sucker – more or less a shoot, or daughter plant – from an existing tree, and the plant will grow, pretty high and pretty fast.

One thing you likely will not get is fruit. Conditions aren’t right for that here in Southern California. But occasionally, some growers do get lucky. Your local nursery will probably have info, and might have suckers for sale. If not, I recommending contacting Encanto Farms, in San Diego (www.encantofarms.com), which sells (and dispenses advice) on many types of banana plants.

@Marc:

One of the things that would be good – at least from a global hunger standpoint – about GM bananas is their defacto unexclusivity. Because of the ease with which the fruit grows (see above), scientists generally agree that it would be impossible to create a banana that could be distributed only via the closed, repressive systems the industrial agriculture giants use to create lock-in with other GM products. That’s because one banana tree can beget hundreds of suckers over a lifetime, and suckers – which are about the size of your arm – can be transported just about anywhere, and can live out of soil for up to a year with virtually no special handling. The lack of “security” for exclusive breeds (GM or otherwise) is one reason why the commercial banana companies have emphasized pesticide development over building resistant fruit in the past – they’ve been unable to control the spread of whatever test fruit they’ve created.

But there is a lot of research and growing of experimental bananas, both GM and conventionally hybridized. Nearly all of that work is being done at public institutions around the world. I haven’t heard of a single instance where those fruit would be anything but public domain.

Of course, with major banana disease threatening the commercial crop to the point of extinction, it would make sense for the commercial banana companies to develop new fruit whether or not they’d have exclusivity on it.

As far as other uses – yes, trees could be used as a source of plates, and there’s an intriguing idea there: that the tree could be used, fruit or no fruit, as a source of sustainable agriculture. A very successful experiment has been conducted in Australia has been done that shows that banana pulp is a much, much cleaner source for making paper than conventional trees. Here’s a blog entry I wrote about it:

http://www.bananabook.org/discovolonte/2008/01/this-book-might.html

You might be interested in knowing that there is one form of the banana tree that doesn’t yield fruit at all; it is called the “abaca,” and it is common in the Philippines. It is already used to make paper, and one form of it is very familiar to us. The name of the paper type even gives a hint as to where it comes from: Manilla envelopes.

Dan Koeppel’s last blog post..Video Review: Pudding Dreams. Shattered.

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Kim Woodbridge’s last blog post..My 5 Favorite Articles That I’ve Written This Year

In India and other places, banana leaves are used as plates. Since banana trees grow in Southern California, is it conceivable that they could be grown as a source of ‘plates’? Can they grow fast enough in this climate and with a low enough input to make it worthwhile as a sustainable solution for some restaurants?

Marc’s last blog post..Recipe: Savory Custard

Summer’s last blog post..Green Cleaning Tools – Squeegee for the Shower Door