Bananarama

At last, we're actually eating our own bananas now. They are delicious, much sweeter and creamier than the Cavendish you get at supermarkets. Did you know that almost all bananas sold in the western world are clones of one plant. That means they genetically identical to each other, so 99% of the bananas most people eat taste exactly the same (ok, but pretty average compared to other varieties). Like most modern foods, the variety was chosen for shelf life, yield and disease resistance. This means it was not chosen for taste, which I think should be a high priority for a food. Anyway, enough ranting, here are some pics.

This is a hand of bananas, with 15 fingers. The first fruit we picked were under ripe and didn't ripen after picking. Then we picked some more and they took around 3 weeks in the fruit bowl to ripen, so now we're picking a hand at a time and giving some away. We're not letting the fruit ripen on the tree since we want to spread out the picking over as long a time as we can. The hand weighed in at 2 kg. I'd like to think we're saving lots of money in this venture, but I calculated that the 120 bananas we have on one plant should weigh in at around 16kg. Sod's law has dictated we are harvesting in a period of high supply and low prices (about $2 a kilo non organic), so a return of $32 isn't really going to put a big dent in our groceries bill! Maybe next year there will be another cyclone and bananas will be selling for $15 a kilo...

But of course that's not what it's all about. It's about learning new skills, building resilience, self sufficiency, the sense of joy you get when you see your plot yielding new fruit and finally it's about the yum.