Joey Biernacki, age 10, of Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, for his question:

Do bananas have seeds?

Yes, a banana may have a few seeds. But they don't look like much and they don't amount to anything at all. When you plant seeds from other plants, most of them sprout a new generation of plants that look like their parents. But not the banana. Its few dusty little seeds are useless, quite useless. If you plant them and pamper them, even in the best banana type soil, they do nothing at all. By and by, they decay and their goodness is used to nourish other plants.

You may not notice the dusty little seeds inside a creamy colored banana    and not every banana has them. Actually they are not meant to sprout new banana trees. The new generation sprouts up from the old roots. The roots of a banana plant are called its rootstock because they do not behave quite like ordinary roots. True, the rootstock soaks up moisture and nourishment from the soil, just below the surface. But it looks like a tangle of thick stems    and, like stems, it sprouts new greenery above the ground.

The banana is classed as a herb because there is no woody material in its tall stem. After the harvest, the greenery dies down and a new top sprouts up from the old rootstock. This starts as a slender green spike that soon shoots up 14 feet tall, or higher. Actually the shoot is a tight roll of huge leaf stems. The stalk begins to look like a slender trunk and when it gets to the right height, the leaves open like a huge green umbrella. Some of the shady leaves are two feet wide and 12 feet long    and the whole thing looks somewhat like a handsome palm tree.

Now it is time to prepare for the harvest. A thin little stalk sprouts from up there in the leafy green umbrella. It is dotted with bumpy buds and soon it starts to sag downward. In time, the buds become clusters of yellow blossoms. The petals fall, leaving rings of mini¬bananas clustered around the dangling stem. Soon these stubby little fingers turn their tips up toward the sky. In this position, they grow to full banana size    and the big clusters are harvested before the fruit turns yellow.

When the harvest has gone to market, the tall stem and its leafy umbrella wither down to the ground. If nobody bothers it, a new plant will grow and produce a new harvest about 18 months later. The old rootstock can be dug up and transplanted to a new home. It also can be separated into sections. If each section of rootstock is planted and tended in suitable soil, it becomes a whole new plant. So when growers want to multiply their banana plants, they forget about seeds because there are none worth having. They simply break up an old rootstock and plant the pieces to get more banana plants.

Bananas are very fussy about where they live. They originated in warm wet parts of tropical Asia and they refuse to grow in any other sort of climate. Most of the bananas we eat in Canada and the United States are shipped from the West Indies, Brazil and Mexico and other warm moist regions of South and Central America.