This is not banana territory. The soil is good, and water is readily available; but the climate is a limiting factor. The weather does not get very warm for very long. When it rarely gets almost unpleasantly warm during the day, it generally gets tolerably cooler overnight. Bananas are none too keen on such comfortable weather. They want sustained warmth, with less fluctuation of temperature between night and day.
This is precisely why I should not have acquired as many as fourteen cultivars of banana. Some may never do more than generate appealingly lush foliage here. Those that produce fruit will unlikely produce fruit that is much more than marginally palatable. One of the cultivars is the oem, which is the largest banana ‘tree’ in the World. I have NO idea of how to manage it. ‘Mekong Giant’ also grows quite large and heavy. Two cultivars are unidentified, so could possibly be copies of others. ‘Kokopo Patupi’ may not have survived last winter, as it has not begun to regenerate yet. Four other cultivars were given away, but then generated pups that are now returning! I do not remember how many cultivars are here now, but I know that there are too many.
Oem is resuming growth faster than the others, but with small leaves from within pseudostems that produced larger leaves last year. ‘Double Mahoi’ is likewise regenerating dinky and pale leaves that are actually dinkier than those that emerged earlier from a shriveled carcass of a dinky pup that got frosted last winter.
I want all of the cultivars of banana to survive and thrive, but I should have planned for them better. Now, I should plan to find homes for most of them instead. Even if I could manage them all, I can not justify doing so.
Tony Tomeo 
I love the banana foliage but don’t like the fruit enough to grow them. That must be a lot of work for you. I might be convinced to get one of those varigated red ones…
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The foliage is the primary reason that Brent does not use them within his landscapes. There are too many other species that provide lush foliage that does not get shredded by dry breezes. It gets shredded in windy situations here, but is prettier where sheltered. I know that I can keep a few or even several sheltered, but this many is not easy to accommodate, especially since some get SO tall. Two are variegated; ‘Zebrina’ is green with red blotches and ‘Siam Ruby’ is lighter red with green blotches.
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You have so much fun Tony. I’d love to be able to grow bananas but though we figure our winters are pretty mild it still gets frozen up around here for long periods. The Oem variety sounds really interesting but seems you will need a lot of room to just bring it down, to fell it, when it’s done. Is this not the year for it to really start to grow? Good luck with it all.
Robin
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Exactly! Oem ‘seems’ interesting, until one realizes that there is no place to plant it where the ‘trunk’ can be cut down intact. Because it is not a real trunk, no one can climb it to cut it in pieces once it starts to deteriorate. Therefore, it must be cut at the ground. Since it can get fifty feet tall, it must have fifty feet to fall. Since it can lean in any direction as it grows, it needs fifty feet of clearance in all directions! We still have no idea what to do with it. I would like to grow all the cultivars that are here, but some need quite a bit of space, and even if we had that much space available, I do not want that many to dominate any landscape. They are not very pretty, and then their foliage gets icky over winter.
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