Banana harvest

This banana flower first appeared on Thanksgiving Day (US) in 2006

A week later, several bananas had already developed.

In two week’s time, the bananas were pointing skyward, and I was sure we’d be eating bananas by Christmas.

In the third week, we began supporting the tree with a board. Later, because the wind kept blowing the board down, we wrapped a rope around the tree and tied it to another tree in the woods.

Then the plant seemed to go into a trance for a month and little external change was seen, except the flower kept unfurling bracts and dropping them to the ground, so the stalk grew longer.

Finally, on Lincoln’s Birthday, 81 days after the flower appeared, a touch of yellow appeared in the bananas.

The procedure here is to harvest the bananas while they’re green and hang them in a shaded area to ripen. Then you cut down the plant because it will produce no more fruit and its young are already growing. So the deed was done – one blow of the machete for the stalk –

 

and one blow of the machete for the plant.

(More details at Flckr.)

Now to wait for the ripening!

Bananas, plantains; pollination, parthenocarpy

How do you tell the difference between a plantain and a banana?

It’s pretty straightforward when you walk into a fruit and vegetable stand and see large, green plantains next to smaller, yellow bananas.

Plantains are starchy and are cooked like starches. Bananas can be cooked, too, but the bananas we know from temperate climates are “dessert” bananas and usually are eaten raw.

But it’s not so easy to tell them apart when you look at two adjacent, growing plants, one plantain, the other banana.

More on banana development

I promise not to turn this blog into a banana blog, but the rapid development of this flower continues to astonish me. On day 4, the outermost “leaf” (which I’ve learned is actually a bract) fell to the ground revealing the first row of bananas.

The second bract is lifting and beginning to reveal its own baby bananas.

I’ve had a hard time finding the names of the parts of the banana flower on the internet. However, the Ganesh Mani Pradhan & Son Nursery has come partly to the rescue by creating a nicely illustrated Banana Flower Salad. The salad is served in the flower bracts and a visit to the site is worthwhile simply to see the image of the completed salad.

What intrigues me is that a fully developed stalk of bananas grows “upside down,” with the ends of the bananas pointing to the sky. See the Wikipedia entry for Musa, the genus name of bananas, for an example. Scroll about 2/3 of the way down the page for the stalk. The young flower in our back yard, though, as well as the flower used in the Banana Flower Salad, has the ends of the young bananas pointing to the ground. Will they eventually fold up and point to the sky?

The suspense is killing me.

 

First banana flower

The first thing I saw out the kitchen window after getting back to Panama was the first flower on any of our banana trees. It was Thanksgiving Day in the United States.

Two days later the flower had already changed.

This morning I noticed one leaf (maybe this is a sepal – I have some banana biology to learn) was separated from the rest of the flower.

When I walked around to the other side to get another view, here’s what I saw:

Juvenile bananas! Three days after the flower dropped down from among the leaves! Here’s a closer view of the bananas and their individual flowers:

To all the banana growers in the tropics, my apologies. This is my first and it’s terribly exciting.