How to Grow a Banana Tree

Monday, 21 May 2012

This is only the second summer that i've had my banana tree after receiving it from Amazon in February of 2011. I've been surprised by how well it survived and grew this past year. Here are some of the previous pictures and posts where i've written about it.

Banana Tree - 2011
Banana Tree Update - 2011
Banana Tree Planted - 2011
Winter Seeds - 2011

Now it was time to move the banana tree from my living room, where it had been sitting all winter, to the backyard. It was a pain to move outside, it weighed about 100 lbs. I'm surprised the bucket didn't break. But the tree was alive, healthy and all the leaves looked green.

but then...

The phrase about March "comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb" didn't really seem to be true this year. The end of March was cold and so was April. The temperatures dropped down to the 30's at night. My banana tree died. I guess that's why there aren't a lot of banana trees in Michigan.

It's not actually dead, the root system will hopefully send up a new tree when it warms up. But just the fact that i moved it indoors all winter just to move it outside too early and let this happen, is a bummer.

So i cut it down to a stump.

As it warmed up during the month of May, two new shoots came up. So i decided to transplant it from the big green bucket to the ground. You can see the new banana tree shoots on either side of the stump.

So hopefully in the next month i will see one or maybe two new banana trees growing in my backyard.

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How to Grow a Lotus Plant Indoors from a Seed

Monday, 27 February 2012

Taking everything i learned from last year:
American Lotus
Sprouting Lotus Seeds
Lotus in the Sun
Final Lotus of the Year

I'm trying to grow some lotus plants inside again this winter. But rather than a big pot with mud i figured i could try placing them in clear plastic cups inside of a fish tank. That way i could see how the tubers or roots are growing too.

The 3 keys to growing them:
Heat - underwater heater, stays right around 88 degrees
Sun - by the window and grow light
Humidity - Saran wrap over tank

Here's the setup. There are 2 Asian Lotus seeds and 2 American Lotus seeds.
I think it took about 5 days for them to break through the seed shell, and 4 days to grow to this point. The Asian Lotus seeds sprouted first.
The roots starting to form.
A week and a half later they had grown quite a bit bigger.

Several leaves.
The first tuber and more roots.

Second tuber a week later, so it appears to still be growing.

We'll see if they continue to grow or die like the many others that i tried growing indoors.

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Bamboo in Heavy Snow

Saturday, 25 February 2012

At least once or twice every winter here in Michigan we get a day of really heavy snow. Even though this has been one of the warmest winters in a long time, i woke up a couple of weeks ago and saw this in the back yard. There was a snow and ice storm and the bamboo was completely bent over and almost broken.
But the bamboo is strong. I went out, shook off the snow and the trees immediately started unbending and straightening up.

Here are links to previous posts about growing bamboo in my backyard in Michigan:

• Bamboo - Transplanting from West Virginia

• Bamboo 2 - First Winter

• Bamboo - 2011 - Winter and New Shoots

Here's what it looked like a few days later, good as new.

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Final Lotus of the Year

Wednesday, 9 November 2011

Well as of right now the lotus plants are in the basement for the winter.

I didn't want the roots to freeze so i brought them inside. When it warms up enough in the spring i'll take them back out.
Here's what i have previously written about trying to grow them:
Sprouting Lotus Seeds
Lotus Update
Lotus in the Sun

Anyway going back a few months ... I was down near the Ohio border again for work and saw the lotus fields. Here they are in August, in a channel off of Lake Erie.
A view of all the lotus beds.
There were millions of them.
The view from the causeway.
A view of one of the rivers near a power plant to the north, flowing into Lake Erie.
Here's what the area looks like from above. The water is Lake Erie, the highway is I-75.
Back at my house the hot 90 degree summer days really made them grow big. The sun, heat and humidity outside caused them to take off. Here was one of my first aerial leaves before it opened up.
There were around four aerial leaves per pot.
The lotus effect on the leaf.

Some close-ups.

Back down near Monroe, Michigan i found a place where you can see them up close. It's visible from I-75 but you have to loop around to get there.

The leaves there grew much bigger then the ones in my backyard.
The seed pods which grew from the center of the flower.
By this time a lot of the seed pods had turned brown.
A couple of them broke off their stalks.
But there was a ton of them. If you figure that each seed pod has around 20 seeds on average, you can see how many seeds are here.

Although like i said earlier, seeds aren't the main way that these grow. They spread from the tubers in the mud, like how grass in your yard spreads.
Here they are in September. The leaves are turning brown and starting to go dormant.
The ones in Monroe had already turned brown.
This is right before i cut the leaves off, drained the water and moved them to the basement.
I'm expecting great things next spring. Hopefully all the energy is stored up in the tubers and will cause the plant to shoot up bigger then they grew from a seed this year.

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Banana Tree Update

Saturday, 27 August 2011

Before it gets too cold i thought that i should move the banana tree to a bigger pot. The roots were completely growing out of the old one.
Here's 1 of 2 new trees sprouting up.
The bigger pot weigh's probably close to 100 lbs with all the dirt in it.

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Penny Auctions

Monday, 20 June 2011

A while back i was all fired up about trying to figure out online penny auctions. Since then i sort of gave up, but i wrote down what my plan was.

In case you don't know there are tons and tons of sites on the internet called "penny auctions." They are sort of a combination between an auction and ebay. The trick is that you have to pay for every time you bid. Quibids.com is just one of those sites. It's the site i decided to focus on.Here you pay 60 cents for every time you bid. At first glance it looks like an amazing deal. Tv's being sold for $50, two-hundred dollar gift cards being bought for $9. The thing you have to remember is that the bidding started at 1 cent and for it to get up to $30, that means that it received 5000 bids at 60 cents per bid. That means that the web site made 5000 * 0.60 = $3,000 for the TV. The site makes it's money when things are being bid on thousands of times. There are hundreds of these sites and they all basically look and work the same way.

Quick, hurry up and bid on that Xbox, you have 19 seconds and you can get it for $1.42. So you bid $1.43, spending 60 cents in the process. Then 3 seconds later someone else bids $1.44. This process keeps going and going.

You sign up, buy a number of bids (100 bids costing $60 at Quibids.com) and then you can start bidding on whatever you'd like.

A great site is bidcentz.com which keeps track of some of the items sold, at what date, time and price Most people just bid without any information, sometimes they get lucky. But my goal was to have as much information as possible about history, trends, etc, so the site bidcentz.com helped a lot. Let me just say now that this is still a total shot in the dark, i didn't try any of this, it was just an experiment to see if it could work.

I decided to look at 2 of their popular items. 1 expensive item and 1 cheaper item.

• Item #1 - Apple iPad 16Gb Wi-Fi. This, along with the 32 and 64 Gb models are very popular on the site. They can sell for as little as $3 and as much as $90

• Item #2 - $100 gift card. They are not as popular and usually sells around $10

Again, the key thing to remember here is: the website doesn't make money on the final price, they make money on the number of bids. The iPad retail price is $600. That means at 60 cents per bid, the website profits anytime the price reaches $10. 1000 bids * 0.60 = $600 on average the iPad sells on their site for $35. That means on average they get $2,100 for each one they sell.


The trick, I THINK, is to follow the trends to find a date and time and you can narrow down when to bid. For example IF on every Friday at 6pm one sells for between $30 and $40, then there's no real point in bidding between $0 and $30. Odds are that it won't sell then.

I started tracking what would be the best times to buy and iPad. It turned out to be early on Tuesday's and 4pm on Friday's. Around those times they usually sold for less than $4. It was basically just a little bit of information to narrow down times and prices, giving you an advantage of when to bid. Sort of like investing in the stock market.

But this is the point where i gave up. I never signed up and tested to see if the bidding strategy would work.

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Bamboo - 2011

Tuesday, 24 May 2011

This was a tough winter on the bamboo, lots of leaves turned yellow, overall though they survived.

I'm still not sure exactly what type of bamboo i have. I think the small trees are Canebreak bamboo (the only native bamboo to the US) and the larger ones are Yellow Grove bamboo I'm only guessing from pictures i've seen. The Canebreak bamboo i got in Kentucky and the Yellow Grove i got in West Virginia.

I also have Moso bamboo that i grew from seeds i ordered online. After reading about the different types i've learned that as long as the roots stay above -10 degrees Fahrenheit they should still be alive in the spring.
In the summer i piled lots of grass over the root area and in the winter i made sure to pile lots of snow around the base of the trees to help insulate them.
Here's the shoots this year from the little Moso bamboo. This plant is only 1 year old and probably will never be very big. Down in Florida it could be 40 feet high and 6" in diameter. But here in Michigan it will never grow that size because of the cold winters.

I was happy with how well the Yellow Grove bamboo grew in 2010. I was really excited this year because of all of the roots i saw growing last year. This picture was taken early in the summer 2010.

Around Easter i noticed the new shoots coming up. Over 30 shoots from this one cluster of trees.

This is one of the bigger shoots, maybe 1/2" in diameter.

These pictures were taken over no more than 10 days. You can see the shoots on the left. They will grow sometimes over 8" on really warm days.

One day i was outside and saw ants chewing on the bamboo. I sprayed some insecticide but this is what they looked like the next day.
Because of the heavy rains and ants, not every emerging shoot fully grew to trees but overall this has been the best year for the bamboo.

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