Just got a question from my nephew. He has several banana trees in his yard with large bunches of fruit. He wants to know how you tell when it is time to pick them.

Ned

The best way if you have the time, is to pick them hand by hand. You know that the whole banana bloom becomes a banana bunch, and each bunch is composed of several hands, and each hand you will have individual fruits. when you go to grocery stores, those bananas that are joined together they comprise the hand and in most varieties, the hands are either spirally arranged on a stalk to form the bunch or sometimes in pairs opposite each other. Anyway, when given the time, as soon as there is yellow color forming on the hand, you harvest that hand, then proceed to the next the following days. The banana hands starts ripening at the top going down to the smaller fruits. You can ripen them on the plant but they will attract insects and rodents.

In my case, I never get the chance of them turning yellow before the first frosts come.

From what I have been told you can harvet them as soon as they are full & plump. Most harvest them still green & let them ripen in a dark dry space in your house. I was also told to put a apple in a bag with them to help them ripen...

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The ripening bananas produce so much ethylene that you can use them as a tool to ripen other fruits. Take those green pears home and put them on the shelf in a paper bag with a banana. The banana at room temperature produces ethylene that will signal the green pears to start ripening immediately. The paper bag holds the ethylene in stagnant air around the fruits, yet allows oxygen to go into the bag for respiration in the fruits...needed to make the enzymes! In just a few days the pears should be ready to eat! You can do the same with avocados.

Sometimes the tastes are dramatically different when you let them to start ripening on the plant (start of yellowing) before harvesting them. Not only will they be plump, but they will taste better. The reason why grocery store bananas tastes kind of watery to me is that they were harvested very green. As a homegrower and if your climate allows it, harvest the bananas as late as you can, just to when they start to ripen. And to me, the latest is just the night before we are going to have our first frost of the season by the next early morning.

Although you can ripen them on the stalk, they would sometimes crack open. You can harvest the banana fruits even if they are way immature and they will surely ripen. These are prime examples of hardcore climacteric fruits. But taste would be another matter.

There are plenty of reasons why they are harvested green. One of the main ones is that it takes time to move them from one country to another and they will ripen and rot away in transit if you harvest them like I would. As a compromise they harvest them when they have enough fruit pulps and very green but quality suffers. One of the compelling reasons why I plant fruit trees in my backyard so that I can harvest them when I want to harvest them, preferrably when they are of prime quality, much better than those from the styrofoamy or watery flavored inflated clean and attractive fruits from the stores.

In Panama We would Cut the whole thing ( Banana Stalk) Down Lots of waist even with 6 kids. Im gonna do the hand by hand so i wont waist then when i get too many share and Freeze and dry some .
since i have 19 nieces and 1 nephew and 2 Great nephews i think my freezer and dryer will wait for awhile . just my 2 cents Tammy

I agree with Joe in a way.
When I was a kid I grew bananas in my hometown in our backyard. Some of them were purple and 5 foot tall and sometimes you have to cut a hole to the ground because of the banana fruit touching the ground. They were that long. But there were bananas that were 15 feet high so the only way to harvest them was to cut the trunk, being careful not to damage the fruit when the whole thing fell down. I also wait until the first finger ripened or turned yellow before I cut the whole trunk down. If they are tree ripened, you can really taste the difference. In a few dysa the rest will turned yellow and ready to eat.

Last week, Thursday, I had the opportunity to eat a banana
right off the plant. I was at a meeting of the OC/CRFG at the
Long Beach VA Hospital. They have a two acre garden to
give the Vets the satisfaction of gardening outside.

There were a dozen varieties of bananas. We got to pick
ones that were completely yellow. They tore off the bunch easily. They were highly aromatic, the way bananas are
supposed to be. The peal came away from the pulp smoothly
and the flesh was soft and warm from the sun. The taste was
so much better than the usual imported ones, that I had
another. One of the gardeners mentioned that they won't
keep, so I helped out, by having a third.

My conclusion is that it is best to pick them as they ripen.