Meet the farmers growing bananas in Ontario

[castanea]

"Call them bananas, but a couple of farmers are successfully growing tropical fruit in southern Ontario.

Terry Brake and business partner Laurie Macpherson started Canada Banana Farms six years ago. They now cultivate papayas, pineapples, lemons, guavas, bananas and more.

Macpherson said the bananas get a lot of attention when they take them from the farm in Blyth, Ont., to markets in Exeter and Goderich, where they sell at four for $2."

www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/canada/meet-the-farmers-growing-bananas-in-ontario-1.3007500

[blueadzuki]

Beyond the obvious local advantages to having such fresh bananas, I wonder if such endeavors could serve as protected enclaves, since I would imagine that Canada is too cold for the Panama II virus (that is the one they think is going to drive bananas commercially extinct, right) and that might provide a barrier to keep the bananas infection free longer.

[steev]

I would think Iceland is the ultimate protected enclave, which is already an important supplier of bananas to Europe, thanks to geothermally-heated green-houses.

Is the Panama II virus deadly to bananas, as such, or only to the commercial (Cavendish?) strain?

There are so many varieties of banana, many of which are more interesting than "Chiquita" banana.

[blueadzuki]

Well, the more of them there are, the better I suppose (Iceland may be doing fine for supplying Europe but if put in a situation where it had to supply the whole world, I'm not as sure they could pull it off)

No, just Cavendish (though I assume that, as Panama II is a subversion of Panama I if I got into a relict population of Gros Michel (the banana we had before Cavendish) it would infect that too). And given that a lot of the articles I have read focus less on the loss of bananas to the Western world (which when you get down to it, would largely just be an inconvenience, we generally don't need bananas to live.) and more on it's loss to communities in the Third world (where bananas are actually a staple and essential part of the diet) I have to assume that the types they are relying on (such as plantains) are also susceptible.

Oh, I agree on that (which is why I said "commercially" extinct not actually extinct"). But I am a realist. I know that, however smart it would be, the commercial growers will never get around the problem by returning to diversity. It would be like imagining a world where heirloom OP tomatoes were once again the only kind there were. It sounds lovely, but I know it will never be. As long as there exists an international/global produce trade, monocultures and industrial varieties will exist. The days when the vast majority of the people of the world everywhere were small farmers growing locally derived varieties for their own sustenance are gone; and short of the oft-talked about collapse of society, I doubt we will ever see it return And even then, I rather suspect we are so used to it that the moment society started putting itself back together and trying to return to the level it was, the same systems would all come back again (that's a big reason why I have so little hope in the survival of the human race, I am pretty sure that we are so bad at learning from out mistakes that even if something knocked us all back to the days before we started doing all of those things that put us on this path to destruction* it would only be a few generations of putting things back together before our innate laziness led us back to the same destructive habits that got us in trouble in the first place and we'd be on the road to the next total collapse, and again and again until we get the one no one lives through.)

* And bear in mind, I consider this path begins all the way back with the discovery of fire, the wheel and language.

[steev]

And on that cheery note...

[prairiegarden]

Iceland might do better at supplying the world as the issue of heating is a minor one, trying to heat all the greenhouses in Ontario that would be needed would soon decimate the forests and with hydro would be outrageously expensive. It was interesting that they haven't taken advantage of any of the experience and information gained in the past 20 years about heating greenhouses either through the design or structure, they look like the standard greenhouses being heated with regular wood heaters. There are infinitely more energy efficient ways to deal with winter now. Neat idea to be raising bananas though.

I was wondering where they got their plants! I thought the seed in bananas wasn't viable ?

as far as the rest is concerned, there are lots of people doing interesting things now with small plots and roofs and even walls, so bit by bit the people who take care about what they eat and so forth may end up being the ones who pass on their genes..perhaps we are seeing a slow process of evolution take place here. The problem is that there are always people who are good at getting other people to do the work and even paying them to supervise,( or stay out of the way!)  and thus governments are born...

[steev]

Bananas are mostly grown from offsets; few have viable seeds, especially not the commercial varieties.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I visited a greenhouse in Idaho which is growing bananas. The greenhouses are heated geo-thermally. Pomegranates were being grown across the street. The area has an abundance of hot-water springs. The heating equipment is easily put-together, and it doesn't take much. Another farm was raising tropical fish.

[prairiegarden]

The people in Mass. who wrote Paradise Lot are growing banana outside their front door but it doesn't produce edible fruit; apparently the leaves are edible though. It freezes back to the ground each winter and then comes back in spring.

[blueadzuki]

Aug 2, 2016 19:07:00 GMT -5 steev said:

Bananas are mostly grown from offsets; few have viable seeds, especially not the commercial varieties.

Depends on the banana. Some of the wild ones are pretty much ALL seeds. Also I seem to recall when I was a kid getting a packet of seeds for edible bananas from Thompson & Morgan at off the seed rack at the nursery (which I think were marked as being Cavendish) and actually getting one of the to sprout. I seem to remember them as being HUGE quarter sized rock hard black seeds (which could go a long way to explaining why they were bred out of the commercial population)

Actually now that I think of it, I saw a kit for growing Bananas being sold at a Jo-Ann's (craft store) as recently as last year, and given that they were being sold off the counter without refrigeration I have to assume they were using seeds (I bought the only one they had for bananas, but when I got it home, it turned out someone had popped it open and removed all of the contents, leaving just the case/growing box)