Do bananas reproduce by seeds? (How do bananas reproduce?)

Banana is one of the most popular fruits, grown in tropical and subtropical regions. Its aliases include northern banana, mountain banana, field banana, etc. It is a large monocotyledonous herbaceous plant of the Musaceae family.

Are bananas grown from seeds?

Humans have been eating bananas for a long time. According to ancient records, bananas were already cultivated in Guangdong around the 1st century BC. However, bananas are not propagated by seeds now.

Bananas are a plant that blooms and bears fruit. They originally have seeds , and there are a lot of them, resulting in very little flesh. They can also be grown from seeds .

But we also often see some wild bananas with a lot of seeds in them, but these wild bananas with many seeds are basically inedible.

However, after artificial cultivation and improvement, the fruit now generally does not contain seeds. The small black particles in the pulp are the outer skin of the seeds. Only some wild varieties may still have seeds.

Therefore, bananas are generally not propagated by seeds, but by division, tubers, suckers, tissue culture and other methods .

Common propagation methods and methods of bananas

Sucker propagation (a vegetative body that grows on an underground bulb)

Sucker propagation is a common method of banana seedling cultivation, mainly using sword buds (red shoots) and jackets for propagation. The buds used for division as seedlings are generally more than 40 cm high.

Banana tuber propagation

Tuber propagation is mainly used to cultivate a large number of seedlings in a short period of time. Plants that have not yet bloomed or borne fruit or underground stems with large suckers (sprouting in October and November) are used as materials.

The best time to cut the pieces is from November to January of the following year, when most of them can germinate and can be planted in April, May and June when the seedlings are 40 to 50 cm tall.

The advantages of this banana propagation method are that it can reduce pests and diseases, has a high survival rate, and grows and bears fruits in a uniform manner. The initial plants are shorter than those of sucker propagation and are more wind-resistant, but have the disadvantage of low first-generation yield.

Banana division propagation

The conventional propagation of bananas is mainly to propagate by division using suckers. When the suckers grow to more than 40 cm, they can be divided and kept as mother plants for the next generation or as seedlings.

When dividing bananas, you should first dig up the soil next to the sucker, and then use a shovel to cut between the mother plant and the sucker. After the seedlings are dug out, cut off the overlong and injured roots, dry the incision in the shade or apply wood ash, and then plant it.

Banana tissue culture propagation

This method of reproducing offspring is used for large-scale banana seedling production, which mostly adopts tissue culture rapid propagation technology. It can not only obtain a large number of test tube seedlings in a short period of time, but also remove viruses such as mosaic disease, which is beneficial to increase yield.