Review - www.bananas.org

Review of www.bananas.org

If and when you decide to grow fruits or other edibles in your home you will probably be doing a lot of research online on different varieties, best practices, other's results and even some good forums for some Q/A.

It is true that ordering catalogues and reading some online reviews is a great start, but you probably want to dig deeper and get more infomation from real people.

So, nearly five months ago, I set out to gather as much information as I could on growing bananas. I live in the northeast and knew this would not be easy. I found tons of information on growing bananas, descriptions and even how to take their suckers to grow new ones. But, I still had the dilemma of figuring out which I would actually have a chance of growing in my climate.

It was then that I found bananas.org

With a very small contribution I had a year's membership and all the information I wanted a couple of clicks away.

The website is setup as a Forum with different topics, threads, image galleries and some how to sections. I was immediately recommended to do a introctory post and to fill out some of  my profile. If any of you have been on other Forums this is usually the first step.

But, after I had introduced myself I was bombarded with hello's and welcome's from members all over the world! I also found a "thanks" icon on every post very handy. So if someone liked your post they could select thanks. You could set it up so all thanks and post notifications were sent to your e-mail. In my first week I had found others who were growing bananas, some in new england, some in Europe, and others like me looking to get growing, but had some questions.

I then started searching other threads to see if there were other newbies like me. I found several and followed them from the beginning of their thread. I made sure to comment and ask questions and everyone was very nice providing feedback and follow up.

I found tons of galleries of all kinds of bananas, flowers, descriptive images, and other plants categorized for everyone to see.

One of the best things about this forum is that the more you use it the more you can learn from it. The system learns which threads you have followed or commented on in the past and keeps them in your control panel. Any time someone comments on those posts you get a notification of it so you can make sure to follow it as well.  This is a great way of being able to go back to a post you had been interested in at one point and continue to follow it.

I started my own threads later on and had some followers give me input on an almost daily basis and I ventured out to other topics as well.

Now if you are thinking that this whole site is about just bananas then you are mistaken. It encompasses any fruit, vegetable or gardening topic you can think of. When I got my strawberry plant and my fig plant I immediately went to bananas.org and found the forums associated with them.

I even started my own bell pepper thread!

I still go on this site almost daily to catch up with people, check people's gardens and to get some of my questions answered. It is truly a great resource and community. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to grow and is growing something in their home.

And if you do join you can look me up under the name: tommyg

Thanks!