Hello my name is Katie Rushworth and I'm going to show you how to kind of protect your tender
plants that you can't necessarily take indoors over the winter and this banana has been really
successful this year but it does still need some protection over the colder months.
A banana believe it or not is a herbaceous perennial it's not actually a tree at all
so it puts on this much growth in just one season which is quite incredible, stunning.
The stem is actually a false stem, a series of leaves tightly packed to give it this kind
of structure and framework so just like any set of leaves you can cut them all the way
back . To do this I'm using my pruning saw and I'm
going to cut it so there's only about four foot of it left which may seem drastic but
in order to protect it and keep it is the kind of treatment it wants.
Now you'll see I've cut it on a slight angle and the reason for that is I don't want the
rain or snow to sit on there and water to go down the plant and to rot it so by cutting
it on an angle it then allows things to run off and not sit on directly on top of the
cut. You can see on the top here how the leaves have torn and the plant is actually devised
in order to do that so the where the leaf is made up you can see this veining all the
way down. So when in tropical places winds blow and storms coming it will shred the leaf
so the wind filters through it therefore supporting the plant.
If these didn't shred, the wind will most likely pull it out of the ground quite a clever
adaptation. Now I'm gonna give the base a quick
clear of any dead leaves because places like this are a perfect place to hide for snails
as you can see right here it's cozy and dry in there and they love a bit of dead foliage
to hide in so all that will come off. The next thing I want to do is to protect it with
fleece so I have these and these are hot cultural fleet bags so a bit like glove if you like
to go over the top. Now I got lots of fleece. It's not necessarily
that the banana plant doesn't like moisture it's because moisture keeps hold of the cold
and where there's moisture there's ice and frost and that's not what we want, okay .
And then to keep it in position I'm going to use just a couple of bits of string. Now
you do want it to be relatively tight because it'll just flop around in the wind otherwise,
okay. Now I know it doesn't look pretty for the
winter but it will look much prettier come next year because we've looked after it.
The next plant on my list is this Gunnera. This magnificent plant here is a gunnera and
you can see it has these enormous towering leaves, it's wonderful it's perfect streamside
like this it loves to be kept damp and its root system to constantly be wet. However
it does need some winter protection and the best way to do that is to cut these huge stems
back and use the leaves as a kind of blanket if you like to protect it over the winter
months so that's exactly what I'm going to do.
I am removing the stems because I don't really need that bit it's just the leaf I'm
after for protection. This is the central crown here so everything is going
to come back and be folded over this section. It's pretty humongous you could use it as
an umbrella. It's like they were actually designed for the purpose they fit so perfectly
over the top and there we have it, it's created its own
blanket for the winter it's all tucked up so it'll be protected from all the elements
and then come next spring after the Frost's have passed they can all be lifted off and
you will see new green area coming through new shoots and it will spring to life and
once again put on those magnificent leaves. For more videos visit silverlinetools.com