PRUNING AND TREATMENT OF SUCKERS 39 



planter may by careful pruning, if the rains are seasonable, 

 so regulate his banana walk, when once established, that 

 a large proportion of the crop shall come in during the 

 months of high prices, from March to June. 



In reckoning the time it takes suckers to fruit, plant 

 suckers and ratoon suckers must be distinguished. When 

 the bulb is planted, it grows into a plant sucker, and in 

 the lowlands of Jamaica fruit may be ready to cut from it 

 in twelve months, or even less, from time of planting, 

 although unfavourable conditions, such as a poor sucker, 

 drought, wind damage, may prolong the time ; but, 

 generally speaking, a plant sucker produces fruit fit for 

 harvesting in twelve months from planting. It is quite 

 different in speaking of ratoon suckers ; first ratoons may 

 take fifteen or sixteen months, or more, to mature fruit, 

 but the older the banana and the thicker the shade, the 

 longer the ratoons take to come into bearing. There is 

 no discrepancy here, but the age of the plant sucker is not 

 added to the twelve months. As a matter of fact, a plant 

 sucker really takes longer to bear than a ratoon sucker, 

 if the time is reckoned from the date of removing from the 

 mother plant, but there is a period of rest after removal, 

 a check to development, and new roots and new leaves 

 have to be formed. 



The whole subject is so important that no excuse need 

 be offered for dwelling on it at considerable length, and 

 adding observations by H. Q. Levy from the Journal of 

 the Jamaica Agricultural Society (xvi. 305, 1912) : 



" I offer advice on this part of banana cultivation with 

 a certain amount of diffidence, for so much depends on the 

 size of sucker to be pruned, and its situation to other 

 suckers, that it is hardly possible to lay down any hard- 

 and-fast rule. There is no part of banana cultivation that 

 needs as much individual attention, supervision, and 

 judgment as the pruning. The retaining of wrong suckers 

 may mean the loss of hundreds of pounds to the large 

 cultivator. If the planter is fortunate in growing a fairly 

 even field of plants, then all is plain sailing, as one size 



