Orlando Banana-O-Rama
What a freeze actually does
UF/IFAS Banana Growing in the Florida Home Landscape is the paper for this crop. It calls Florida climatically marginal for commercial production, and the reason is freezes. The grocery bunch is almost always imported. A yard plant is a different bet.
The trunk is not a tree trunk. It is a pseudostem of packed leaf sheaths. The real stem is an underground rhizome, the corm. Shoot growth is best around 80°F. Growth slows below 60°F and stops at 50°F. Between 60°F and freezing you get chilling injury, including choking: the flowering stalk fails to emerge from the pseudostem at all. At or below 32°F everything above ground goes water-soaked, then brown and dead. Below 28°F the plant may be killed to the ground. New growth usually sprouts from the rhizome when warm weather returns. Do not dig the corm up. Wait for it.
A row cover buys a margin on a light freeze. It does not make Central Florida into south Florida. Get this.
Dwarf types for the yard
The Cavendish group is the grocery banana. Clones differ mainly by how tall the pseudostem gets. Dwarf Cavendish is the shortest, widely planted, and better adapted to the cool subtropics than most commercial cultivars. Gros Michel is the one to skip: poor cold tolerance, and the paper says not to plant it in a home landscape.
Time from planting a small sucker to harvest is 9 to 20 months even without a setback. The flowering stalk pushes up 10 to 15 months after planting. From that event to harvest is another 80 to 180 days. Fruit the same year after a hard freeze is not a promise.
Cut the bunch when the fingers are plump but before they turn yellow. The tell is shape rather than color: the edges have smoothed and the sides have swelled. Hang the bunch in a shady, cool place. A hook keeps it off the counter while it finishes. Get this. Do not refrigerate bananas before they ripen. Chilling injury means they may never ripen properly.
The grow page has sword suckers versus water suckers, spacing, and the disease ceiling. This page is the freeze. If you want a weekly grocery bunch, buy imported fruit. If you want a plant, pick a dwarf type, leave room for the mat, and plan on a freeze rather than hoping past one.