Out with the old and in with the new. Sometimes you just have to accept that plants need replacing and your garden can benefit from the occasional rejuvenation. Frank and I have several plants in our sites and today we tackled the first.
We’re (i.e. Frank is) digging out this dying orange tree. Frank pruned it ruthlessly back in spring and a bunch of new shoots gave us hope, but whatever rot killed half of it is spreading. The whole trunk is losing its bark and a lot of the new growth is dying with leaves turning yellow and dropping.
That’s it, it’s outta here!
Enter new banana plants. We dug up these three pups from a wild banana forest growing along an alleyway near home. The hope is that these bananas are a different variety than our existing bushes. The adult plants are easily twice as tall as ours so with any luck they are Lady Fingers (I’m pretty sure the existing plants are Cavendish). If they turn out to produce no fruit or to taste nasty, we’ll either try to shift pups from our existing set to this spot we’ll break down and buy new plants.
old and new banana plants
Laura Rittenhouse's Gardening Journal 