Growing Banana plant from seeds

Can you use a store-bought banana?

It is an English version of the post. If you want to read it in Polish go: Uprawa banana z nasion

Have you ever considered growing a plant from a banana you bought from the store? The Internet is full of videos showing how to do it. Theoretically, it’s simple. All you need to do is buy a banana from the store, cut it lengthwise, extract parts of its pulp along with the seeds, and plant them in a pot. And voilà! After some time, a forest of bananas should appear in that pot. That’s the theory. And what is the reality, then?

You can’t grow a plant from a store-bought banana

Why not? The answer is simple. To grow anything from a seed, you must start with… a seed — bingo! You won’t find seeds in the bananas you buy from the store because they don’t develop them. Those black dots in the banana’s pulp are just remnants of structures (more precisely, degenerated ovules) from which seeds should develop, but they don’t.

Longitudinal section of a store-bought banana showing the black dots inside, which are the remains of the seeds.
The black dots (marked with arrows) inside store-bought bananas are not seeds. They are only the remains of the ovules – structures from which seeds should develop but do not.

Why do store-bought bananas have no seeds?

Fruit development is only possible when pollination of the flower, fertilization, and consequently seed development occurs. However, this scheme has certain exceptions, and the seedless banana is a prime example. Despite not forming seeds, its fruits do develop. This phenomenon is called parthenocarpy. All cultivated banana species and varieties develop seedless (parthenocarpic) fruit. Besides bananas, many other plants can produce parthenocarpic fruit e.g., pineapple, grapevine, and pear tree.

Parthenocarpy can occur spontaneously in some plants, but it can also be induced artificially. For example, by various treatments, including spraying the plants at the flowering stage with suitable phytohormones. And since seedless fruit has a high commercial value, this is indeed readily used. After all, the fewer seeds a fruit has, the more space there is for delicious pulp.

So, how can you grow your Banana plant?

You surely won’t be able to grow anything from a banana bought at the store. To convince you of this, I would add that even breeders and plantation owners only propagate bananas vegetatively, using rhizomes. But don’t worry, the fruits of wild banana species produce viable and germinable seeds. Compared to the tiny black dots found inside store-bought bananas, these seeds are significantly larger (about 0.5 cm in diameter) and take up a significant part of the banana inside. So, just get the right seeds, and you can start the adventure of growing a banana plant!