A comparatively lowly plant, its productions
in suitable soil are prodigious. In nine or ten months after the
planting of the rhizome, it bears under favourable conditions a bunch
weighing as much as 120 lb. to 160 lb. and comprising as many as
forty-eight dozen individual bananas. So great is the weight that to
prevent the downfall of the plant a stake sharpened at each end--one to
stick in the ground and the other into the soft stem--is needed to
buttress it. Before the fruit has fully developed, other shoots have
appeared; but each plant bears but one bunch, and when that is removed
the plant is decapitated and slowly decays, and the second and third and
fourth shoots from the rhizome successively arrive at the bearing stage
and are permitted to mature each its bunch and then fated to suffer
immediate decapitation. And so the process goes on for five or seven
years, by which time the vigour of the soil has been exhausted, and
moreover the rhizomes, originally planted about a foot deep, have grown up
to the surface, and are no longer capable of supporting a plant upright.
Then a fresh planting of rhizomes elsewhere takes place. It must not be
thought that the banana defertilises the soil.
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