Banana

You can enjoy the rich flavor of your own homegrown bananas if you live in U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 9 through 11. These areas are best for bananas because they experience few times when temperatures dip below freezing over the winter.

This is important to ensure your banana plant yields fruit because the plant must survive the winter if you want to harvest bananas from it. The time it takes before you can enjoy your own bananas will depend on a variety of factors, including temperatures, shade and drought.

The banana harvest occurs once the fruiting stalk appears and has matured for three to four months. You can harvest the bananas by cutting off the entire stalk full of plump, green bananas. They should be ripened in a cool, dark place until the bananas turn yellow.

If you have a banana plant, you must have 10 to 15 months of growing for the plant to produce fruit. The exact time the plant takes to fruit will depend on various environmental conditions. If you give the plant prime conditions, it will likely produce fruit for you.

As tropical plants, bananas prefer full sun, but you can grow them in places up to 50 percent shade, notes University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. Growing banana plants in partial shade is not recommended because not enough sun may lengthen the time it takes before the banana plant produces fruit.