Because Portlanders--from Mayor Slopbucket to the lowliest barista--believe email chain letters saying that bananas are going extinct.

If you can't beat global warming, you might as well take advantage of it and grow crops that love the warmer weather.

Why do you think we have a blossoming wine grape industry that didn't exist 30 years ago?

A lot of it is because banana plants are the new horticultural fad. Unlike urban chickens, I can actually understand this one. These varieties grow big and lush during the summer, and can be packed up and stored during the winter. This way, you get something exotic that's potentially edible (always hyped by someone who's never managed to get one to bear fruit), that gets big and impressive in summer, and doesn't have to be replaced every spring. That's all.

As for growing bearing bananas? That depends upon the particular variety, and how warm your locale gets in the summer. Let's just say that Portland won't be competing with Panama for standard Cavendish banana production any time soon.

Erik:

Avg. temperature in downtown in 2010 was 54.0 degrees. Average temperature 30 years ago was 54.1 degrees.

For the 30 years 1981 - 2010 it averaged 54.6. For the previous 30-year period 1951-80 it also averaged 54.6 degrees. Data from NOAA.

It is not getting warmer. We just had a summer with one day over 90 degrees, as I recall.

People are planting bananas because it has become popular. There are trends in gardening. Most here are a hardy hybrid banana. Bananas are herbaceous plants, not trees. They grow from corms, like irises. So you can plant them as annuals. Take the corms out and store them for next year.

Oh, goody, the ban on non-native plants is over!

If they ever lose their a-peel, maybe they'll be contained by the leagues of rats and bumper crop of squirrels seen this year.

The plants provide great habitat for rodents. In southern CA the mice and rats love those plants...along with some of the palm trees!
With the easy pickins in the compost bins the rats and mice will do very well indeed!

Can you keep your rodents in PDX please? We're trying to regain sanity at the local level here in LO and are not liking this slop bucket thing. Maybe this is just a plot by unions to increase government employment in vector control?

Robert,

Please don't bring your anecdotal evidence to a climate change debate. We all know that weather is different from climate. The only data sets that matter are much larger than one region and cover much longer periods of time than 30 years.

Unless it's warmer in Portland next summer than last, or we have more hurricanes in the Southeast, both of which are incontrovertible evidence of Anthropogenic Warming. We must quit eating meat, driving cars, or shopping at Walmart. Or we shall perish from the Earth.

Do I have to stop eating pepperoni sticks? I mean, they aren't really meat, right? Either way you are probably right about them causing me to perish from the earth.

What's the big effin' deal if a few people want to grow banana plants in their yards? It's not like tomatoes are native to Oregon either. It's not like everyone in the "bike/sustainable neighborhoods"(whatever the fark that means), suddenly jumped on the banana tree bandwagon--they're still pretty rare to see in Portland, and I've never seen one in my neighborhood.