houseplant lovers? need help with saving a plant?

Question

I have a plant that only says musa on the card. It has a big stalk that shoots up through the middle but does not seem to be growing. I cant seem to find how to care for this plant anywhere...it has big leaves with a kinda dark red shaded patterns...can you help me? I need to know specifically, light, food, and soil needs. His leaves are drooping and turning brown..thanks for any help

Answer 1

Congratulations on choosing a potted banana plant for your interior landscape. You will find this to be an exciting, beautiful, and rewarding plant for your family.

The following care tips will make this experience even more pleasant for your family--and your plant as well. These care tips apply to other tropical plants as well.

When you receive your potted banana plant, pot it in a pot that is just a little larger than the pot that it was received in. If you received it in a 4" pot, it's ok to pot it up to a one gallon pot at this time--if the roots have filled in the area of the 4" pot when you remove the pot. If the resulting soil and root cube keeps the same square or round shape as the pot, and you see white roots at the bottom of the soil mass, go ahead and pot it into a larger one gallon pot.( a pot with a measurement of approximately 8 inches across by 6-8" tall). If the soil crumbles off the roots when you pull it out and doesn't hold the shape of the pot, repot it gently back into the 4" pot. Your plant is not ready for a larger pot yet.

If your plant is ready to be repotted, choose a well draining potting mix such as Miracle Grow, or get some professional potting soil at a local nursery. A very good one from a nursery is Promix HP. You want to use a well draining mix. If your potting soil isn't light in weight and rather fluffy looking, don't use it. Never use a soil mix from a dollar store, or the cheapest store brand on a houseplant. Place some soil in the bottom of the pot, add the root ball of the banana plant, and gently place soil around the plant so that the level of the plant's root ball is approximately the same as in it's original pot. Don't plant it much deeper than before, this will cause it to rot. You can add a shallow layer of the new soil over the top of the old soil just to cover it and make it look fresh, but make it very shallow, only enough to cover it thinly. NEVER pack soil tightly around the roots of any houseplant, or "firm up" the soil as people do outdoors. This causes the soil to hold too much water, and doesn't allow much oxygen to reach the plants' roots. Always use a pot with drainage holes in the bottom for water to escape and for air to circulate. If you are just "in love" with a particular pot that doesn't have drainage holes, use that pot as a "cache" pot -- pot up your plant in a pot with drainage holes and place it inside of that lovely pot. Drain out excess standing water after watering. That way your plant gets the care IT needs, and YOU get your pretty designer look too!

Now that you have repotted your plant, place it near a sunny window, and it's time to water it. Water your plant with a mixture of 1 Tablespoon white vinegar ( to change water ph and make nutrients more available to your plant's roots), and 1 teaspoon of a balanced 20-20-20 water soluble plant food (such as Peters Professional, or Miracle Grow) in a gallon of room temperature water at each watering. Water your plant thoroughly until water comes out the holes in the bottom of the pot, let stand a minute, then drain out all the excess water from the saucer. Don't ever let your plant sit in standing water, this will cause it to develop root rot and can actually kill your plant.

Allow your plant to dry out before watering it again. The best way to tell if your plant needs water again is to put your finger into the soil and feel for wetness. If you stick your finger into the pot of soil and feel dampness when you put your finger in about an inch or two inches deep, don't water your plant. If you don't feel any dampness, then your plant is ready for water again. Water thoroughly as before, then drain. Most starter size interior banana plants in gallon size pots in typical indoor situations seem to only need watering about every week to ten days, sometimes as infrequently as 14 days. Be sure and feel for dampness before watering again. Your plant will need water more frequently as it grows, but be sure and check for dampness every time, as this is your best indicator.

Interior plants often benefit from misting with water in the wintertime as moisture levels decrease with heating of your home's air. Another easy method to increase humidity levels around your plants is to purchase a large plant saucer, fill it with clean gravel (river rocks, pea gravel, lava rock, or decorative fish tank gravel) and pour water almost to the top of the gravel in the saucer. Then place your plant (with or without it's own drainage saucer) on top of that gravel filled saucer. As the water evaporates, it will increase the humidity in the area around your plant. You can use a very large saucer for a grouping of plants. NOTE: If you choose not to have your plant sitting in it's own saucer, make sure that the water level does NOT touch the bottom of the pot as that will cause your plant to stay too wet and encourage root rot!

One of the leading causes of interior plant death is over watering. Often plants can bear less than optimum light levels just as long as they aren't drowning at the same time! Of course your banana plant would appreciate bright light inside, so place it close to a sunny window. A south window is ideal, but a west facing window is also a good choice where it will receive lots of afternoon light. Turn your banana plant from time to time to make sure that it's not growing one-sided towards the light.

Some people like to supplement the lighting with artificial light sources in the home to make their plants grow better. Many garden centers and home centers carry specialized spot lights for your houseplants. These are not necessary unless you have placed your plant in a suboptimal location. So put it in as much light in the home as you can.

Check your plant from time to time to make sure it's not developed any pest problems. Frequent visitors to banana plants are spider mites. They make little webs on your plants in a severe infestation, in a light one, they will just look like little spots of dust usually on the underside of your plants' leaves.They suck the sap from the plants' leaves and eventually can cause leaf death and in severe cases, death of the plant. If you do see this occurring, take your plant to a safe location indoors such as a heated garage or out of the normal living area and spray your plant with a good indoor insecticide from a local garden center or home store. Replace the plant when the spray has dried. There are also very good organically based soap sprays for these pest problems. Use whenever the symptoms recurr. Normally spider mites are not a problem in outdoor plantings unless your weather is unusually dry. Increasing the humidity indoors also helps, but will not cure a spider mite problem in itself.

If you desire, in the summertime, you can place your banana plant outdoors on a patio or porch or even plant it directly into the soil in your landscape. See my other e-bay guide, "How to grow bananas in cold areas successfully" for detailed instructions.

New update! I've learned something very exciting about these plants, just when you think you know it all. I had one that was getting much too tall to think about the average homeowner bringing it indoors for the winter, it had a trunk height of over six feet, not counting the leaves. So I cut it off to a height of three feet tall. It was dramatic, let me tell you, to cut off the entire top part of the plant with a sharp knife! But now, one month later, it's pushed new leaves out of the center and the only evidence that it was cut off at all is that one of the leaves is cut in half and it has a small step looking mark on the trunk. So if you are growing a tropical banana in a pot to bring indoors and you think it's getting just too large, that is a great option for you. Just look up your first frost date for your area and six weeks to one month before that date, cut your plant off. That will give it plenty of time to grow back and be pretty for you to bring it indoors. Remember that the top of the plant will take up a couple of feet, so cutting a plant at around three feet will result in roughly a five foot plant when it grows back. And the leaves that came out of mine were still very large like they were before cutting them back, too...There are cool recipes also on the internet that I've not tried yet, but they use banana leaves to cook with. You could try that with your leaves that are cut off if you've not used pesticides on them.

Most of all, remember, enjoy your potted banana plant! If this guide was helpful to you, please take a moment to post feedback about my guide, and feel free to use this guide for your personal use.

Answer 2

it's a banana plant.... the one with patterned leaves is especially pretty.....

musa needs LOTS of water and fertilizer.... potted ones need a big pot.... if it's in the ground, it will do much better....read here...

http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/38351/

Answer 3

The one fella sure does give a lot of information! Thumbs up to him. The other lady kept it short and sweet...kudos to her too!