No More Tall Banana Trees For Me

I decided to eliminate my really tall banana trees. First of all, they are difficult to tend. As the trunk grows taller, removing dead leaves and killing any banana roller caterpillars becomes impossible. Plus harvesting the bananas becomes dangerous for me. The trunks weight a lot, and I'm not always successful in cutting them down gently. One of these days I can see myself getting hurt while trying to harvest a banana bunch.

The problem that tipped my decision was that the coqui frogs were getting into them. With trees that tall, it was impossible for me to spray the frogs. So these tall bananas have to go. 

With chainsaw in hand, I buzzed the trees down. Cutting the trunks into manageable pieces, I carted off the trunks and leaves to the compost bins. I filled 11 bins!!! Needless to say, I didn't do this all in one day. Nope. It took several days of hard work. 

Digging out the mats would be quite an effort. Rather than doing that, I plan to simply harvest the regrowth for the compost bins. Whenever a banana tree gets too tall, I'll cut it up for biomass. If the whole mat eventually dies, well so be it.

This clump is beside the chicken pen. I also cut down the clump on the far side of the pen too. 

Banana patch along the driveway is regrowing.  

Since deciding to eliminate the tall varieties, I've been making an effort to propagate the dwarf ones. So rather than cutting away unwanted keikis, I've been digging them up and starting new banana patches instead. With the coqui frog invasion, I've shifted to short banana varieties.