Taking Down the Banana Trees-For Good

I spoke of removing my banana trees in last month's Vegetable Garden Update post, but here is the process, problems and lessons learned post.

First of all let me say, I simply adore banana trees in my garden. I even really really liked the spot I had the bananas growing in. It was the perfect spot-for them, but not for all the other plants growing in that garden. I really have no other spot that would work for these banana trees in my garden so I decided to remove them from Tiger Gardens permanently.

It began one very nice spring day with a shovel and lots of energy. By the early afternoon the shovel was barely holding up, and the gardener lost all of her energy but the banana roots were all gone-hopefully never to return (Update: a few weeks later a few bananas have showed themselves to be very 'Survivor' worthy and came up in the bed. They've since been removed and are destined for Dave from the Home Garden blog at this week's Plant Swap. Dave, be sure to pay close attention to my warnings:) Banana roots are very fibrous, thick and sinewy. They stretch a good 10-12 feet from the plants. The extensive root system is one reason the banana trees are able to sustain themselves so well during the summers even when the weather is dry. I tried to show the fat thick roots in the above picture. They are really very prominent if you look closely at the bottom of the tuber. The roots make for difficult digging but the rhizomes were really the issue for my energy and shovel. Imagine gigantic canna and/or iris rhizomatous roots that grew three feet down and were more than one foot around. Then imagine there are 20 of these tubers with gigantic rhizomes coming off from them in every direction and criss crossing one another. If you can imagine this mess you can imagine the huge job I had digging out these roots.
The shovel had issue with the big tubers because the tubers were really tough and stringy. Look in the above photo. I am holding a part of the tuber away the other part in order to show you the strings and fibers in the tuber. The tubers were quite starchy like and I wonder if they are edible? I can imagine one tuber would sustain a whole family for one week. It was pretty difficult getting all of the tubers out of the ground but I think I finally did-Not. In the process I found several new banana sprouts. I potted them up for sale at the MG plant sale or plant swap. All banana trees will go with a warning:

Site Musa bajoo carefully because you never ever want to have to dig them out. They need full or partial sun in good soil with an area about 10 feet around where they can spread to their heart's content. Be forewarned, they will spread.

in the garden....

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In the Garden