Ice Cream. They are even hardy up here in 9a. Bananas are labor intensive, unfortunately. They need 100 inches of water a year and a lot of fertilizer. That being said, I had a neighbor in 9b/10a who never did anything to his and had a huge clump that bore every year. Go figure.

I'm using permaculture with mine. I piled up leaves and pine bark mulch around it this fall to protect the corm, and just left them. Then I planted a pigeon pea next to it for nitrogen and chop-and-drop. I tossed every kitchen scrap I had around it, didn't even dig them in, and threw a lot of green prunings around it. Just used the area around the plants for a compost heap, sort of. Watered it daily if it didn't rain during the hot spells. Only used Miracle Gro on it twice when it was small to get it to start growing.

It was 3 feet tall when I got here in mid-July last year. It's now about 12 feet tall and putting out a bloom. It also put out two healthy sword suckers, so whatever I was doing must have worked.

That being said, when I was in 9b/10a, we had a bad freeze where it got down to 25 degrees every night for 3 nights and all my bananas froze to the ground, even the ice cream banana. The more sheltered dwarf cavendish in the back came back up, and the ice cream came back up, but the Praying Hands and Thousand Fingers were just dead.

Nighthawk,

I've planted all kinds of bananas and my favorite is still Raja Puri which is a dwarf variety. It fruits readily every growing season and it's a low maintenance plant. As far as hardiness goes, we haven't had a freeze these past several winter, so they just continue to grow, multiply and bloom. I think they should survive a brief period of freeze, but for extended hours of freeze, I'm sure they would be fried or even killed to the ground. I planted mine close to the house and that helps.

Recently, I've also added dwarf Orinoco into the planting. I heard that it's also a rather cold hardy variety. We'll have to wait and see later what it will do.

Maybe the problem is your banana plants were not big enough, small plants are not as resilient and may not be able to survive the cold. Also make sure you are planting them somewhere that gets full sun on the ground during the winter. It's important that the banana plant's roots remain warm. Planting against a south-facing wall is good, it can help keep them just a little bit warmer in the winter.