Banana

**Siting:** Banana grows best in organically rich, moist, well-drained soil in full sun, though it tolerates part shade, particularly filtered light during the heat of the day. Strong winds should be kept off the plant since they can tear the large leaves, and the soil should never be allowed to dry out; regular fertilizing keeps growth vigorous.

**Climate and care:** The plant is hardy only in USDA zones 10 and 11, so in colder regions it is usually grown in a container and brought indoors for winter. Younger plants often do not flower or fruit until their second or third year, and container specimens cut back to the ground each fall may never flower at all. Where frost threatens, an outdoor plant can be overwintered by cutting off the foliage, wrapping the saved trunk in a tarp, and storing it somewhere it will not freeze, then replanting it outside once frost danger has passed and watering it liberally through summer. Each pseudostem dies once it has flowered and fruited, but the corm beneath it continually sends up new shoots, or suckers, that form the next season's pseudostems.

**Pests:** Banana has few serious insect or disease problems outdoors, but houseplants grown indoors should be watched for aphids, spider mites, mealybugs, and scale.

**Diseases:** The plant can be affected by anthracnose, wilt, and mosaic virus. Fusarium wilt, also called Panama disease, is a soil-borne disease that has at times devastated commercial banana production on a large scale.

**Harvest:** Banana bunches are cut while still green, roughly 100 days after flowering, and the pseudostem that bore them is cut to the ground afterward to make way for a new shoot. Commercial stalks are ripened after harvest by exposure to ethylene gas.

**Storage:** The fruit continues to ripen once picked, its peel changing from thick and green to thin and yellow with brown spots, and eventually to a soft, blackened, fully ripened state as the flesh sweetens and then ferments.

**Culinary:** Banana fruit is eaten raw or cooked in dishes ranging from curries to chips, fritters, and preserves, or simply baked or steamed. Starchier cooking types, often called plantains, are a major carbohydrate staple in parts of Central America, Africa, and the Philippines, eaten firm and neutral-flavored when green or sweeter when allowed to ripen.

**Ornamental:** Many banana plants are grown in gardens and as houseplants chiefly for the tropical effect of their huge paddle-shaped leaves rather than for their fruit.

**Industrial:** Beyond food, banana plants supply fiber used to make banana paper and textiles.

**Historical:** In the early twentieth century the American Medical Association promoted the banana as a health food for children and as a treatment for celiac disease.

Banana traces to wild plants native to Southeast Asia, tropical India, Indonesia, and northern Australia, and has been in cultivation for as long as 7,000 years. The wild progenitors were diploid and produced inedible, heavily seeded fruit; hybridization between different subspecies and varieties, followed by selection for the sweetest, seedless types, gave rise to the edible bananas grown today. Spread beyond its native range was driven entirely by human movement: bananas reached Europe by the 10th century and were carried to the Americas in the 16th century by Portuguese or Spanish voyagers, while separate stepwise migrations carried the plant from eastern Indonesia out across the Pacific islands to the Marquesas and eventually Hawaii.