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LEONIE NORRINGTON: I love bananas. They're one of the best tropical plants and can be used for so many different things. They're ornamental, they make great windbreaks and screens,

but the main reason is right here. They're delicious and versatile fruit. Bananas are easy to grow in the tropics. Now that it's the wet season and the monsoonal rains are here,

it's the perfect time for me to show you how to create your own banana patch. The first thing we need to do is get some suckers. You'll find them at the base of the adult plant. If

you don't have any adult plants in your garden, buy some suckers from an accredited nursery. Now the ones we're looking for have a sword leaf. These broad leaf ones will still

produce fruit and they'll make a beautiful clump of bananas. They'll just take a lot longer. To separate them, use a sharp shovel to cut off the piece of corm with the sucker

attached. When you're planting bananas, you need to be aware of Panama Disease. It's caused by a fungus that lives in the soil and if it gets into your garden, it'll devastate

your bananas and it's almost impossible to control. So be extremely careful about where you get your banana suckers from. To maintain good hygiene practice, it's also a good idea

to rinse the dirt from the roots of the suckers and leave them in the shade to dry out for a couple of days. I also make sure that I rotate my bananas to different areas every three years.

When I build a new banana patch, I like to dig a hole a couple of metres wide and about half a metre deep. The soil from within the hole I build up from around the edge in a horseshoe shape

so that the water that's running across the block gets caught in here. Bananas love water. Then plant the suckers along the inside edge of the hill. I'm growing a variety called

'Cavendish' that'll produce bunches of short, thick bananas that weigh up to 45 kilograms. Finally, I dump a wheelbarrow load full of chicken manure in the middle. You can

through almost anything in here, including grass clippings, leaves and scraps from the kitchen. Bananas are greedy buggers and they'll gobble up anything you throw at them. Remove any

sucker growth until the first bunch appears and then allow one or two suckers to grow to replace the parent. It'll take about six months until the first flowering stalk appears and then

another two months until the fruit is ready. That means I'll hopefully be picking fruit by the end of this year. So what do you do when your bananas start fruiting? Well sometimes

these bunches can get incredibly heavy and pull the whole tree over, so I've got these wonderful supports. It's just a bit of steel in a 'U' shape attached to a star

picket and you just put it underneath the tree and give the banana tree the support it needs. It's also a good idea to remove the purple sheath which is called the flower bell. Do it as

soon as soon as the bunch is as big as you want it to be. Bananas taste better and don't ripen all at once if you leave them on the plant. Unfortunately, this is very tempting for the

birds and fruit bats. So they don't all disappear before I get to eat them, I make these wire cages to put over the banana bunches. They're very simple. It's just a cylinder

of pig wire covered in fish netting and all the materials to make one of these are available at your local dump shop. You put the cage around the bunch and tie it top and bottom. When you

want to pick a few, just untie it. If you need to pick them green because something is eating, they're falling over or are splitting, cut them when the bananas are rounded without ribs

and the flower tips rub off easily. Cut the stem at least 30 centimetres above the bunch so there's something to hang on to and it's easy to tie up. Trim the leaves as soon as they

collapse and start to die so more light is let in to deter pests. It's easy to see why I love bananas. They're delicious versatile, easy to grow and maintain. You can eat them

straight off the bunch or use them in cakes, custards, puddings, pikelets. You can even freeze or dry them. They are the perfect tropical plant for your garden.