Yes, we have LOTS of bananas!

I thought about the idiom “A watched pot never boils” as I took yet another look at the two hands of bananas suspended by rope from the porch rafters. 

Lots of fat, green, unripe bananas hanging from the rafters

Much to my disappointment, the fat, green fruit were no riper this time than they had been the day before. Darn! I hoped at least a hint of yellow would appear.

The bananas are hanging in our porch because the plants on which they had been growing snapped in the recent storm. 

The banana plants that broke in the storm

Fortunately, none of the fruit was damaged when the banana trunks broke. After the rain died down, my husband, Ralph, and I went out to cut off the two hands. We brought them inside to ripen.

On the ground with all fingers intact

Ralph and I have been growing bananas at our Groveland property for a couple decades. Since we’ve been doing it for so long, one might assume we’re pretty good at producing a bountiful supply of America’s most popular fresh fruit. One would be wrong.

The fact that banana plants have had a place in our landscape for a long time merely means we’ve had more opportunities than most to make mistakes. Although we have experimented with different varieties and planted them in various locations, our ability to successfully produce reliable crops of fruit has been abysmal. Our most common failure has been in timing. Fruit often grows and looks promising but cold weather appears before the bananas are mature enough to ripen. 

Little frog hiding out in the bananas

Banana trees, which are aren’t really trees at all but are large perennial herbs in the same family as gingers, die back when temperatures drop below 40 degrees. Fruit remaining on a plant which has suffered cold damage will stop developing.

It takes about nine months for a banana plant to produce a bunch of bananas. Plants develop from a system of large underground rhizomes. Growing points called suckers sprout out of the rhizomes and poke through the ground. Under proper conditions, each sucker will develop into a full grown plant that can support a single crop of fruit called a hand of bananas. The size and number of bananas growing on a hand depends on factors such as soil nutrients, sun and wind exposure, availability of water, mulch, crowding and, of course, timing.

Banana flowers

Since each banana plant dies once it has produced a single hand of fruit, growers only have one shot every nine or so months to harvest a crop. Fortunately, the abundance of suckers surrounding the base of each mature plant provide multiple opportunities to try again if the first crop fails to mature in time to harvest.

But poor timing wasn’t the factor for the two hands of (almost) mature bananas now suspended from the porch rafters. Hurricane winds shortened their natural maturation, leaving us to complete the process in a more contrived setting.

And so I continue to check on them daily. If they’re like every other hand of bananas we’ve taken inside to ripen over the years, they will slowly begin to yellow and then — BAM! —every banana in the hands will be ready to eat at once. I counted over 30 fruit in one hand and even more in the other. 

The first sign of ripening!

The idiom says “A watched pot never boils.” But when it comes to hands of bananas, a more appropriate saying might be: “I’m going bananas.” Or at least I will be when the two hands finally mature and I am faced with more ripe fruit to do something with than we can possibly consume.

The same two hands six days later

Guess I better get out the dehydrator. Dried banana time should be here soon. 

Dehydrating time has arrived!

A fruitful harvest

For breakfast, I filled a bowl with small slices of starfruit and bite-size chunks of pineapple topped off with a few spoonfuls of pear sauce and a dollop of maple syrup. The maple syrup came from the local grocery but everything else was homegrown.

The starfruit, also known as carambola, grew on a small tree next to our house while the pineapple bore fruit in the shade of a dwarf bamboo in and among a sprawl of wandering Jews and rain lilies.

I had picked the pears — hard Florida pears with a vastly different texture and appearance than the more familiar store-bought Bosc or Bartlett pears — from an abandoned orchard on a neighbor's property.

A few evenings earlier, I sat in front of the TV surrounded by two large stainless steel bowls, a cutting board, one paring and one chopping knife plus a moist towel to wipe stickiness from my hands. Peeling Florida pears is a messy, time-consuming job, but I didn't mind. Producing pear sauce has become an annual autumn activity. One taste of the smooth sauce that follows a long slow boil of the peeled and mashed fruit replaces any negative thoughts with the sweet flavor of homemade food.

I have last year's mild winter to thank for my morning meal. While Florida pears can tolerate winter frost and temperatures in the teens, pineapples and starfruit are not nearly as forgiving. Until last year, the previous four or five winters in our part of Central Florida were brutal. Chilly temperatures caused tropical plants of all types, including fruit trees, to suffer greatly. Unless covered, heated or otherwise protected, many either died or died back.

That changed last winter when mild weather persisted from late autumn through early spring. Our 10-year-old starfruit tree, which died back during previous cold spells, finally made it through the winter of 2013 unscathed. New limbs appeared and in early spring, small white flowers dotted many of the slender branches, the first hint of the fruitful season ahead.

A few of my pineapple plants also survived. For several years, I have been saving the tops of every store-bought pineapple I'd eaten — about two a month — and planting the spiky green crowns wherever I could find space in the garden. Pineapples are a type of terrestrial bromeliad with a shallow root system, minimal water requirements and a preference for acidic soil in a sunny or semi-sunny location.

Although they are low-maintenance "air" plants, their long growth period requires quite a bit of patience. It takes approximately two years for each crown to produce a single fruit. During that extended growth period, these heat-loving plants must stay out of the cold. Most of my young pineapples died during winter 2012. The ones that escaped harm were either sheltered from chilling by neighboring plants or had been planted during a period when their growth wasn't halted by frigid temperatures.

After so many years of disappointment, it's been exciting to once again harvest fruit from some of our more cold-sensitive plants. While the starfruit tree is just beginning to produce fruit, I don't have more pineapples to pick. But that's OK. Yesterday my husband Ralph and I cut down a small hand of bananas and the persimmons on our trees are almost ripe. There is fruit in our future — homegrown and fresh picked. Breakfast couldn't look better.

Persimmons almost ready to pick

Gone bananas

Bananas ripen when stored in a cool room

Simply Living
September 17, 2012

It had been such a long time since we’d harvested bananas I’d forgotten how heavy a hand of homegrown fruit could be.  That’s why I felt confident when I told my husband, “Go ahead and cut it.  I’ll catch it when it falls.”

Reaching high overhead, my husband trustingly chopped through the thick stalk supporting a cluster of plump yellow and green fruit.  Harvest is best when at least one banana is beginning to show hints of yellow but we had waited a tad too long.  About a third of the fruit were already ripe and ready to eat.

A hand of plump bananas about ready to pick

One final snip of the loppers and the hand of bananas fell into - and through - my waiting arms landing with a peel-splitting thump on the hard ground.

“Whoops!”  I said bending down to retrieve my now less-than-perfect cache.  “Guess that was a bad idea.”

Although the fall bruised several of the ripest bananas, most survived intact and undamaged.  Determined to redeem myself, I grabbed the bunch by the stalk in an attempt to heft it nonchalantly over my shoulder. 

Nope.  That wasn’t going to work either. 

Instead, I picked up our weighty bounty to lug home in my arms.  The hand of bananas must have weighed 25 pounds and contained close to 60 3- to 4-inch long plump fruits called fingers. 

Bananas are native to Southeast Asia where they have been cultivated for thousands of years.  Although introduced to Florida in the 16^th century, the state’s semitropical climate makes commercial banana growing less viable here than in more consistently hot parts of the world.

On our property, we have four stands of bananas scattered about in the hope that at least one location provides the right environment for fruit production.

The most productive one of four stands of bananas on our property 

    

For optimal fruiting, bananas need hot weather, a rich, well-drained soil and regular rainfall or irrigation.  These fast-growing herbaceous plants develop from underground rhizomes or corms that look similar to (although are much larger than) gingerroots.  Gingers and bananas are related.  Both are of the botanical order Zingiberales.

It is out of these multi-eyed rhizomes that aboveground trunks sprout.  It takes between 10 and 15 months for a flower stalk to develop from a newly planted rhizome.  By the time the purple-red flower head develops, the trunk sports two to three dozen long, broad, green leaves, which lend a tropical look to the landscape. 

For the past four years, I resigned myself to expecting little more from our banana plants than a scenic impression.  Winter temperatures below freezing kick the gusto right out of tropical plants, turning green leaves brown and causing burgeoning bunches of potassium-rich fruit to wither on the stalk.

But this winter was different.  Mild temperatures and the lack of a hard frost enabled many of our more cold-sensitive plants to avoid winterkill.  After years of waiting, we could realistically anticipate enjoying multiple clusters of tasty fruit. 

After severing the fruit-bearing stalk from the mother plant, bananas ripen when placed in a cool, dark location.  We chose our pantry and it seems to be working out fine.  Each day when I check, more fingers have ripened.  There are more than enough bananas on that one hand to satisfy our needs and still have extras to share with family and friends.

At least four more clusters of fruit are developing on the same stand as the one we picked.  A few of the others locations show promise too.  It takes about five months for harvestable hands to develop from a flower stalk and since it is September now, that means I have two to three months left to improve upon my catch-a-bunch-of-falling -bananas technique. 

The next time I tell my trusting husband to “Go ahead and cut it,” I’d like to be able to hold up my end of the bargain.