Topic: Where can i buy bananas with seeds?

[wahaj]

hey,

i'm trying to buy fresh bananas that have the seeds inside them. i mean the ones that we normally buy are seedless right?

anyone seen any in shops that have the seeds in them?

i'm asking because i can't be bothered to spend £10 on some site just to buy banana seeds lol.

they dont have to be hardy or anything.....just something i wanna use as an indoor plant.

[woppa30]

Couple of things, most bananas do have seesn in them, but they are incredibly tiny. Next time you are in a health food shop take a look at dried banana, you can just about see the seeds. Secondly I think that bananas a generally sterile. May be wrong on that one though. I think they are propagated via cuttings and there was a worry a few years back since there was a disease getting banana trees and they weren't sure if we would have enough.
Hope this helps,
Woppa

[Larkshall]

I doubt if seed from bananas bought in the shop would be viable anyway. They are cut so early that the seed have not properly developed. Its like picking apples in July. After all they're still green in the shops, you need to keep them a week before they are edible.

[Melbourne12]

Good article, and suggestions for UK-viable varieties here http://www.jungleseeds.co.uk/BananaArticle.htm

Unfortunately I see that the one variety recommended for the UK that will produce fruit is a whopping £29 per plant.  :o

I think that the fruit of all cultivated dessert bananas is seedless.  The normal method of propagation is by removing suckers from the parent plant.

[Palustris]

Musa cavendshii is the one which produces the edible baanan sold and it is a sterile clone. All the banana plants (of that variety) are the same plant!

[OllieC]

I'm sure I remember being told once that you could choke or break your teeth on a banana seed if you actually found one - they're pretty large and I can safely say that in a long and successfull banana eating career, I have never come across one. Will pm you if this changes.

[Ceratonia]

Musa cavendshii is the one which produces the edible baanan sold and it is a sterile clone. All the banana plants (of that variety) are the same plant!

Cavendish and other edible bananas are all triploid (three lots of chromosomes rather than two) and sterile. As Palustris said, all Cavendish bananas are genetically identical worldwide. Farmers in Africa have been propagating many different sterile banana cultivars for many generations, through cuttings. Plantation owners now use micropropagation in test-tubes too.

Unfortunately, as they all have identical genes, they also have the same lack of resistance to the black Sigatoka fungus, which is becoming increasingly resistant to fungicides. It's been predicted that Cavendish won't be able to be grown in central America within the next decade for this reason. So the choice is to switch to a different variety (which taste different and have a different consistency), or to try to introduce better resistance into the Cavendish (probably by using GM techniques to insert genes from resistant wild bananas, because being sterile, its not very easy to use conventional breeding methods).

Going back to Wahaj's original question, Chiltern seeds do lots of different banana seeds for 2 or 3 quid a packet. Thompson & Morgan are the same and probably many other seed companies. I'd have thought you could pick a seedpacket of one kind of banana or other at any decent garden centre. The seeds are quite large and I've never had any trouble getting them to germinate.

Better still, find someone who's got a plant already - many varieties sucker very readily and produce lots of babies just waiting to be dug up and re-planted. You'll want a dwarf variety for indoors. My neighbour a few doors down, who spent much of her life in Kenya, grows a lot of outdoor bananas which are visible over the fence from our kitchen window - must be at least 10 foot high in summer.  :D

http://www.jungleseeds.co.uk/index.html is quite good for info. I've never bought anything from them so can't comment other than that.

[saddad]

Another reason for staying open pollinated! Cavendish with added GM... just what the world wants! Have been seeing more of a smaller banana recently which certainly isn't Cavendish...
 ::)

[flossie]

just something i wanna use as an indoor plant.

On gardener's question time 10.12.06 - Bob Flowerdew talked about growing plants from the seeds of exotic fruit from the supermarket.  He suggested Paw Paw and date.  Don't know if this might be an interesting way of getting some cheap plants?

[Mrs Ava]

I would try and take a baby from one of mine for you, but they aren't dwarf and at 8 foot and still only pups, they are monsters which I have to tame periodically.  My sister brought a pack of nana seeds when she visited the Eden project and several germinated quite quickly and are growing well. 

I grow lots of fruits from seed saved from supermarket fruits.  Some do great to start with but then die as I cannot keep it humid or constantly hot enough for them.  Others do well, and with a little tlc can thrive.  I have a dragon fruit cactus - which is mean but pretty.  Kiwis also grow dead easily from seeds.  I have had mango, pawpaw and advocados growing and pomegranites do well and are hardy  and will eventually flower and might produce fruits!  Pineapples are fun, in a take your eye out kinda way, and they will fruit eventually, but you need a good bit of room for them as they can become giants!