Folks,

We're living in beautiful central Florida for the first time and trying to grow a banana plant -- actually, so far we've been very successful but now we're at a crossroads. We bought this plant from a nursery last October (I think it was just a 5 gallon, but it might have been 15) and put it in a 25 gallon pot. At the time it had one main "stalk" and two or three very small ones in the pot, but in the last eight months they've all gotten big (about three feet tall or so) and the same size, crowding the large pot.

I suspect we need to plant it in the ground, but complicating matters are that we don't know what kind of banana plant it is -- I'm an old man and forgot what the nursery sold us. Dwarf Cavendish (from the pictures and names on this site) does sound familiar, so perhaps we did get the dwarf, but it's rather critical to us to be sure since we need to know whether to plant it inside our birdcage (preferred) or outside (if it's going to be bigger than will fit inside the birdcage -- anything over 10 feet will be a problem).

Is there any way of identifying this or should we take a chance and plant it inside and if it gets too big just cut it down? I really like this plant (plants?) and would much rather have it inside the birdcage where we can see it when we are swimming (it's far enough away from the pool not to drop anything actually into the pool) but I'd hate to have to cut it down if it got too big.