Anyone have any experience with this variety?  If I start it now indoors will it produce fruit next summer?

Bob,

It may flower and produce fruit but that is only half the battle as it takes 3+ months from when you see the flower till the bunch starts to ripen.  

No helpful answer here, just a banana question seeing we have a banana thread.

Are most bananas outside of the Cavendish(and it's hybrids) really filled with big hard shelled seeds rendering them mostly inedible?

I grow ice cream and it has no seeds at all. 

Interesting. That video that someone put a link to last year about the guy trying to breed a new hybrid of Cavendish( resistant to whatever it is that is threatening the banana monoculture this time) said that most bananas were filled with big hard shelled seeds. Good to know if I ever move to the banana belt.

I have a few varieties. A few banana varieties flowered y end of summer, when I dug them up the flower dried up. I have a large in ground dump of banana basjo variety which isn't edible but I use the leaves in cooking instead.
Viente Cohol is suppose to fruit while still small and ripe. It's bunch within a summer. The trick is to keep it happy overwinter in a large enough container. I have one that will be going I to the greenhouse.

I have VC. Took 2 years from a good sized TC plant to fruit, and I got 3 small bananas. Second generation, sucker grown is about 2' tall, currently.

I'd love to be able to taste a tree-ripened ice cream banana.  I've heard even tree ripened Cavendish taste better than what we get in the supermarket and it's easy to believe.

Calvin,  Ditto what GreenFin said - hundreds of other edible varieties, all of which are not Cavendish. The tropical fruit growers I knew in So. FL grew dozens of different varieties of fruiting bananas - all edible. I'm sure Jon can attest similarly.

Cavendish just happened to be selected, long ago, as one of the best commercial varieties = ships well, has a long shelf life, and responds well to ripening when gassed. I have no explanation for what that banana breeder might have said. I think he was briefly featured in that "Fruit Hunters" doc. Only thing I recall him saying was that the Cavendish plants had to be meticulously hand pollinated and even then it took a lot of bananas to provide only a few seeds to experiment with (going for a replacement for the current Cavendish) .

One of the few banana varieties I was able to get to fruit on my property in Fl was a small, very sweet banana. Had a very good flavor but was just a little more fibrous than Cavendish. Can't recall what var it was. 

Thanks GreenFin! Thanks Bill!

I used to work with a woman, here in southern Indiana, that told me that she had grown bananas for years. She told me that she would plant them out in the garden once the weather warmed, they would grow and fruit, then in the fall she dug them up and stored them in the basement just like you would store a canna lily. She said the bananas were very good. I have been trying it, but one way or another I have killed them over the winter the last 2 years. I'll try again this year...

Last year, I planted ice cream/blue java, viente cohol, cali gold, and an unknown, grown locally and picked up at yard sale. The unknown reached 7 feet last year without flowering. The cohol may not grow as fast but it is supposed to flower at a lower height and be able to flower and produce ripe fruit in a 9 month season under the best conditions. Once it flowers and fruits, it dies but suckers are always being produced around it to take it's place. All have died back to ground level. Bananas seem more like onions than trees.


I also buy various varieties of bananas from the State Farmers Market. They usually have a sticker indicating the country of origin. I bought a 20 lb case of baby bananas from Columbia a few days ago for $15. They are also called desert bananas because they are sweeter than a canvendish.

The only ones I don't like are the reds, which never seem to ripen enough to taste good raw. Maybe they are for cooking like plantains?

http://www.pickyourown.org/gafpfm.php

I have 20 Brazilian banana trees in pots I grow just because they look nice. I've had them for 10 years
Last year I put a few in the ground and they grew great.
This year I'll Craig's list a few and plant a few.
My wife likes them on the porch.
Maybe this year all pay more attention to them and see if I can get some bananas or at least a flower.