Thank you for all you help in the past but yet again I have a problem. We live in Turkey and have a banana plant which when first planted grew one shoot and looked healthy, the following year it produced a hand of bananas whcih although small were edible. Duely cut down the main stem and allowed the next two to grow. That year no bananas but the following year one of the shoots had a hand which never really matured. Cut that stem down and let the resulting baby shoots grow. Sol last November we had two plants that had hands, both looked good. Cut off the main flower when all bananas were showing and waited. Seemed ok for a few weeks and then they started to go brown from the main stem outwards and eventually both hands were useless. So has anyone any idea what is wrong, has our plant gone bad and need to be dug up and started again. The plant gets plenty of water in the summer and is fertilised with Goat manure. Temperature reaches 40C in summer and can go down to -1C in the winter. Any thoughts/help would really be appreciated. Thanks in advance Jill
It's not the plant - some kind of infection got into the bunch through the cut when you removed the male flower bud. Next time you get a bloom and fruits, leave the male flower on until they ripen - this way there's no way for a pathogen to get in. I've had this happen and lost entire 50-60 hand bunches before I learned what the cause was, and now I leave the male flower where it is until the whole bunch is ready to come down.
Thank you for that I shall hope for better luck this year, pleased that it is not the plant because it seems to be fit and healthy apart from that.
