Maybe this has been talked about before here, but I couldn't find it. Why is it so hard to find anyone growing the commercially grown cavendish variety of banana in Florida? It seems like a no brainer being that so many people happily buy these at the grocery store everyday regardless of the fact that they are picked way too early and gassed to ripen. They somehow still taste decent after that. I know the argument that most commercial fruits and veg are far inferior to selected varieties grown by connoisseurs, but has anyone here ever had a properly ripened cavendish? I can only imagine they'd be great.
To me, some possibilities to why we don't grow them might be:
- home growers prefer the novelty of more diverse varieties (but at this point a home grown cavendish seems even more novelty)
- cavendish is disease susceptible (but isn't that only a big deal when grown in a massive monocrop?)
- release is suppressed by commercial growers (bananas are so easy to propagate though)
- is it climatic, is cavendish too tropical for Florida (I'm not aware of any bananas that are)
- there's the dwarf cavendish, but I'm not sure how similar that is to the true cavendish
I don't know, I'm confused. Am I missing something obvious?
Thanks!