P-stem is currently about 3' (it was around 4' when I trimmed it back last month).
4/27
4/28
4/29
I received this DC in the mail on 1/28/2012 as a 2" tall tissue culture plant from Wellspring Gardens. Here's a pic of it then (from left to right: Gran Nain, Dwarf Red, Dwarf Cavendish, and Truly Tiny)--
Here it is right after I planted it:
Here it is in October after a good summer of growth (very center of 1st pic, hiding in the background just left of the Dwarf Red in the 2nd pic):
Unfortunately all of the bananas stopped growing at that point. By January the leaves were all half yellow and by March they were all dead/yellow. I recently cut all the pstems back till I found green, and they all began to leaf back out. Unfortunately, the DC only managed to push out 4 leaves before sending up the flag, so I'll probably trim off half the hands in order to get the remaining hands to fill out.
If the bananas hadn't all stopped growing in October, I think the plant would have flowered sometime in November with a dozen or so big green leaves to power it. The bananas grew fine through their first winter (when they first arrived as tiny tc's), but I nearly killed them in October when I had to shut down the system's circulation for a couple of days. I had some aeration going, but it wasn't good enough and the plants basically almost all drowned (all growth immediately stopped and didn't resume till I cut them back about a month ago). Furthermore, whereas the 1st winter I was bouncing a lot of extra sunlight into the greenhouse (keeping it both warmer and brighter), this past winter the plants had to make due with less light and heat because I built a structure just south of it (only place I could put it) last summer that unfortunately blocks a lot of that 'extra' light.
