A while back I mentioned on this forum my hunt for a Blue Java.

I got two of them about 3 weeks ago from the Queensland banana research station at Nambour.

They arrived in an ordinary envelope, two plantlets in an agar solution. They were about 4-5 cm in total.

After washing the agar off, they were planted in their own little humidicribs - to keep the humidity at about 90 and put under 80% shade cloth.

Today is the first day of the hardening off process - they came out of the humidicribs and the shade cloth was reduced to 40%.

Silly me didn't take any photos of them in their test tubes, but here's one of them now with their test tube beside them.

Has anyone else used cell culture for bananas? Or have you tried to get some of the more unusual varieties from the research station? I know they do send plantlets all over the world, primarily to other research stations, The Nambour research station is supposed to have the biggest collection of banana varieties in the world - may be worth while for you serious collectors who are tying to find the rarer plants. Not sure of what they would charge for overseas, but my two babies cost $10 (that's aussie dollars)

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