Arrktrees, just like all apples are Malus domestica, all bananas are the same Musa species. (Not including one edible species grown only in the South Pacific). Just like you can have Golden Delicious, Granny Smith and Rome apples, you have small pink bananas, big white ones and plantains all from basically the same genome. In my parent's day, the variety was called Gros Michele, "Big Mike". The last load was imported into the U.S. in 1962, but the dying of bananas had been on-going and had inspired the song "Yes, we have no bananas". Since then, almost all dessert bananas are Cavendish. The reason is a disease that wiped out almost all Gros Michele. The reason for the quintessentially British name Cavendish is that when looking for a banana tree that was immune to the fungal disease, one was found in the greenhouses of Lord Cavendish. This single clone is that basis for the whole dessert banana trade. Now, there is a new threat, another fungus. The industry has already moved from countries like Honduras to Ecuador, the new #1 source of bananas to the US. The fungus has infected trees in South China, and recently was found in Queensland, Australia. When it comes to the New World, you will read it in the mainstream media. While you and I may think of bananas as an accessory to breakfast, places like Uganda and that region use bananas like we do potatoes, wheat and rice. This variety, a plantain type, is also killed by the new fungus. When it ravages East Africa, you can imagine what will happen when it hits there, imagine taking everything with rice, wheat or potato off your menu. Anyways, there is a process going on to try to find a resistant banana. Every banana is an ancient seedless (natural?) hybrid. However, have you ever noticed small brown specks at the blossom end of a banana? Those are vestigial seeds. For every about 100 thousand bananas, one will have seeds that can be made to grow. For every 1000 ones that grow, one will make it to maturity. For this reason, the Country of Honduras has a project where bananas are mashed through a sieve to recover those 'seeds'. They are sent to the U. of Louvain in Belgium where they do the growing. As they get plants, they multiply them and give them to people in India, Africa, South America etc. It is hoped on of these will show resistance to the new fungus. I'll stop this long post, there is so much more to say. For more info, look for info on Tropical Race Four.

@Aidan Creekmore yes it's that last picture... I think your sixth. Landed right in front of me and just sat there staring at me on the deck. I quitely got up and went into the house though I wanted to run and screen just like that 10 year old post. Sprayed cutter waited. It left because my bird reflector tape moved so I am back out on the deck nervous trying to enjoy the sun here in Georgia. Lol. Should I worry?

I have had a few friends in my life with MS and I can't say that being super skinny was a major symptom....nor being dumb as a stump, but heck, I'm not a doctor so what do I know ;oP I love the SS said it can't happen...maybe they need to read or watch the news? LOL I would love to be on a HW show. I'm picturing my life as I sit now...I'm in a paint stained shirt with dirty jeans on (gardening and painting while DS was at school) but I do have on a lovely pair of ruby ear rings :oP DS is out in the center hall of (what they would picture as a fabulous mansion on a HW episode) our old victorian and has just had a major 3 car pile up....This means the mansion is full of torn up cardboard as his cars were all boxes... HE's wearing a paint stained pair of designer jeans, a bat man tee shirt (with paint...what do they do at kindergarten? Dip them in paint) and skull and heart boots while screaming at the top of his lungs for an amballance (spelled as he says it). The dog just barfed up the dinner he stole from the cat...the cat is whining about his lack of dinner (I'll refeed him) and there is a herd of deer in the back 40 pooping all over the yard (this housewife will soon be chasing them out with a hose). Ahhh the romance of the real world....it would be quite a show :oP Anyone else want to be on it? heh heh

In general, you will not have a lot of predators lurking around before the bad guys show up. Why? Because most beneficials eat bad bugs. In the absence of bad bugs, the predators aren't there first because there's nothing for them to eat, and it is hard to survive without something to eat. That is why there is almost always a lag in time between when pest insects show up and when beneficial insects show up to devour them and, in fact, the number of pests has to reach a certain level (enough to sustain a population of predatory beneficial insects) first. This often is discouraging to new gardeners. Aphids, for example, appear first. Then, their population skyrockets. You might see an occasional adult lady bug feeding on them, but you don't have to be a rocket scientist to determine that there's far more aphids on your plants than a couple of lady bugs here and there can eat. This is the point where a new gardener usually panics. If the gardener is patient, though, once the lady bugs know there's a heavy enough aphid population to sustain their young, the lady bugs will lay eggs and suddenly you'll have lots of ladybug larvae crawling around all over everything (they look like little gray alligators at that stage), devouring aphids and any other tasty bugs they come across. Sometimes it is hard to be patient and wait for the lady bugs to reproduce, but it pays off. Lady bugs that have overwintered or that are released can be an exception in a way because the adult lady bugs can feed on nectar or on a manmade food called wheast (whey + yeast + sugar or whey + yeast). Green lacewings sometimes will feed on wheast too. You can buy a wheast mix at places like Arbico organics that sell lady bugs or you can Google and find various recipes to make your own. Sometimes a sugar/water spray also works. However, no matter how much wheast you have available, the lady bugs will not reproduce until there's enough of a pest insect population to feed their young. Here's several recipes for homemade food products that can attract some beneficial insects to your garden: Recipes To Attract Beneficial Insects There's more to it than just either attracting or buying/releasing beneficial insects though. They have minds of their own and come and go as they please, meaning they often don't stay where they've been released if you buy/release them, and even the ones who show up voluntarily will come and go as they please, generally (but not always) as the pest population flows. Green lacewings are another very beneficial insect. Sometimes I have a lot. Sometimes I see almost none, and that is typical It just depends on what pest insects you have in the first place because there's got to be some pests to attract them. They are relatively easy to buy and release, but if you release them too early before there's a pest population to feed them, you're wasting your money because they'll fly away as well. Spined soldier bugs are highly beneficial but like the others, they show up en masse only when the pest population warrants it. I usually see only a handful of them in spring, but by mid- to late-summer, there's a lot more of them. They feed on larger insects and are very, very important in a garden. Predatory wasps are important, and most predatory wasps are tiny, so tiny they often are mistaken for flies or other pests themselves. One very important role they play in the garden is the control of various kinds of caterpillars, particularly those that appear very early in the season. Paper wasps (Polistes spp.) are the largest predatory wasp (about 1" long) 've ever seen in my garden. The adults collect caterpillars from plants and carry them back to the wasp nest where they feed them to their larvae (adult paper wasps feed on nectar, honeydew or other sugary substances, not the caterpillars they bring to their young). They take a wide variety of caterpillars back to their nests, including corn earworms, imported cabbage worms, cabbage loopers and hornworms. Trichogramma wasps are at the other end of the size spectrum, about 1/50" long, but they are very important because they feed on many kinds of caterpillars. Adult trichogramma wasps will lay their eggs in/on pest insects. Once their eggs hatch, the larvae tunnel their way through the pest insect, essentially eating it from the inside out. They prey on many kinds of caterpillars, and are easy to buy and release in the garden. Another important predator is the soldier bug (spined soldier bug) which, unfortunately, looks a lot like a brown stinkbug, which often gets it in trouble with gardeners who think it is a pest instead of a beneficial insect. Soldier bugs kill pest insects (including insects larger than themselves) by inserting their proboscis into the targeting pest and sucking out its juices. They feed on a wide variety of pests, about 100 different ones in all, including corn earworms, Colorado potato bugs, flea beetles, Mexican bean beetles, cabbage loopers, fall army worms, beet army worms, and many more. In my garden, the spined soldier bugs usually start hatching out at almost the same time that the leaf-footed bugs start hatching, and the larvae are almost identical to one another. It can take a while to learn how to recognize which bunch of the larvae are the good guys and which ones are the bad guys. A lot of people like to use preying mantids as beneficial insects. I've tried it and was not very impressed with them. They are voracious eaters and will eat everything in sight, including all your other beneficial insects and then they will turn on each other and eat one another until there is only 1 praying mantid left. In that sense, they are not all that beneficial because they wipe out a lot of the beneficials your garden needs over the long term, and are a waste of money because no matter how many praying mantids you buy and release, only the Grand Champion remains at the end. Truthfully, the best way to attract beneficials before pests show up is to have winter-blooming flowers (including weeds---the lady bugs love whatever they find on henbit on sunny winter days) to attract them even before pest insects show up. Some of the best early-season plants in my garden that attract beneficials are henbit, comfrey (it tends to stay green all winter or, if it freezes back on very cold nights, it puts out new growth almost immediately), kale, catnip, catmint and lemon balm. Chamomile reseeds readily and appears very early and I see lady bugs on it a lot, probably in the February or March time frame. The same is true of other early volunteers I see in the garden, including tansy, silver tansy, dill, fennel and bronze fennel. You won't really know what beneficial insects you need, in general, until you plant and see what pests show up. Once you get your soil in balance and it is healthy and grows healthy plants, you won't see all that many pests compared to what you have in the early years in soil that is low in organic matter, low in natural fertility and somewhat imbalanced. The one thing that has helped my plants more than anything was just getting the soil to the right point---once that happened, my huge population of green lacewings virtually disappeared because there weren't enough pests to keep them around. It took me a while to accept the disappearance of the green lacewings as a good thing---but it was a good thing. It isn't that we don't have pests in our garden, but rather we have so much fewer now than we once did. Notice that I didn't mention grasshoppers? The best predator for them is wild songbirds, but in a bad hopper year, the birds get tired of them and stop eating them. The best way to control them out here in the country is to use an organic product containing the protozoa, Nosema locuste, that kills them. It only works in relatively cooler temperatures and on the smaller instars, so I mostly use it in the April-May time frame in the years that I use it at all. Remember other predators that will prey on insects too: song birds, lizards, turtles, frogs, toads, some non-venomous snakes, etc. I'm never lonely when out in the garden because there's always a whole herd of these creatures out there with me. Turtles are one of the best predators around when it comes to Colorado potato bugs. Who knew? I certainly didn't, until I repeatedly observed a turtle traveling up and down the potato rows, day after day, devouring them. That went on for years and years but then we built the beds taller, lined with hardware cloth, to exclude the voles, and unfortunately the height of the beds excludes the turtles too. Hope this helps, Dawn