The Japanese banana, Musa basjoo, is the most commonly-grown banana in the UK. Although bananas can tolerate a few minor frosts, the weather can be often quite unpredictable, and you might only have a short window before you need to protect them.
As you can see, the banana palm leaves had started to flop and droop from the cold weather. We arrived ready with a saw, some small bales of hay and found our customer’s plastic guttering, that she keeps for this annual job, down by the shed.
The foliage of these large sub tropical plants really look good against the wooden shingles of the gazebo. Flo and I were fully in the undergrowth of the palms, which was good fun. Cutting the palms back is a very quick task, the saw slicing through so easily. They were very juicy and full of rainwater.
Once the stems had been cut down to about 5ft, we got the gutter pipes ready to insert over the top of each one. It is a very satisfying job to do. You can of course protect banana palms with hessian, fleece, and wool from the frost. Mulching the base of the plants with a very thick layer of straw, leaves or bark chipping is also a good idea.
It is such a great idea to use plastic pipes for this job, as they are so easy to slide on, and take much less time than wrapping lots of materials around them, as you would with hessian and fleece.
Once all the pipes were on, we started stuffing the tops of them with a good, thick layer of hay to protect the cut from the cold.
It is a good idea to leave about 20cm gap at the top of each pipe, to ensure that you can put enough hay inside to pack around the stem.
For the largest banana stems we used a ladder to make it easy to slip the pipe over, and to stuff with hay.
The last part of this garden maintenance task was to use a plastic plant pot and fit it snuggly on the top of each pipe. This will protect the stem from the winter and cold even more. Great to have additional layers of protection.
It now looks like we have a garden filled with Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men, but this method will certainly help these plants over the winter months. We will look forward to working in this garden in the springtime to see how the banana palms are after the last part of the year.
