Thread by @WerimoMutuli

Banana Cultivars...
A THREAD

Banana seedlings or suckers are easy to propagate yet sold expensively.
Cultivation of bananas starts with a tissue or piece of the mother plant or suckers.

Traditionally, bananas have been propagated by borrowing a sucker from a neighbour/friend

However, such practices have the following disadvantages:
1. Transfer of diseases from farm to farm
2. Poor quality seedlings leading to low yields
3. Not commercially viable

Therefore, other means of getting cultivars have been researched and developed. Eg Tissue culture

Also, if you are looking at commercial banana farming, you need uniform seedlings that will give you mature bananas within the same period and allow one off harvesting in large volumes.
Planting suckers directly from other bananas will not give uniform sizes and ages.

Tissue culture requires laboratory conditions and might prove a challenge to many.👇👇
There's however an almost similar approach that doesn't require laboratory based propagation.
It involves making a seedbed out of the banana rhizome or tissue.

You have seen the best quality banana from a farm and the owner can only give or sell you one sucker?
Well, worry not.
Using the seedbed technique, one good sucker can give you over 100 seedlings!
Follow the steps below as I have done it recently making seedlings for my farm:

Take the rhizome, remove all roots using a sharp knife.
Cut off any dead parts and make minor pillings to see if infested with maggots. Weevils lay eggs that hatch into maggots that eat through the rhizome making holes.
Clean it thoroughly using jik or recommended pesticides.

Once you have a clean, disease free rhizome as directed above, cut the stem from the part it joins the rhizome.
Remove remaining leaves to have the rhizome only.
Cut the rhizome into 8 to 12 pieces, depending on its size, from top to bottom.
Cut off any traces of mother stem.

Dry the cuttings in the sun for a few minutes until the pieces turn black or brown.
Prepare a safe place for the seedbed and secure it with timber of about 6inches, making a good rectangular box.
If you don't have timber, dig half foot rectangular trench of 1m by 1m or more.

Spread the pieces of rhizomes in the seedbed ensuring non overlaps the other.
Spray optimizer to help in rooting and faster sprouting. 10ml optimizer should be mixed with 20 litres of water.
Cover evenly with saw dust of about 5 to 6 inches.
Water the seedbed until wet.

Water after every 3 days.
The rhizome pieces should start rooting as from week 2.
In excactly 30 days, the rhizome pieces should start sprouting.
Once the sprouts are 3 leaves old, remove and cut the seedlings off from there mother rhizome as they have independent rhizome n stem

Cutting off from the mother ensures no transfer of diseases or insects.
Put the seedlings in a nursery polythene bag with manure and place them under a shed.
Water daily and expose them to sunlight after 5 days.
Your seedlings will be ready for transplanting in another 1 month

For long term banana plantation, 1 acre can have 500 stems so dig 500 holes of 3x3x3 feet.👇
Midterm plantation have 1500 stems thus 1500 holes👇
Short term plantation have 2500 stems thus 2500 holes👇
I will discuss more on banana farming in next thread. This was for seedlings