Tag: Ducasse

Backyard bananas – an update

Anyone searching Green Path for “banana” will get a lot of results but none which give any sense of what has been happening in my garden recently. A reader sent me a compliment, a request and an offer (all in one email), so I thought I could reply here, via a general update on my backyard banana growing.

Here’s the email:

Read your blog with interest about native bananas and cultivated types also. I have had at times quite a variety of cultivated bananas, including Sugar, Dwarf Cavendish, Dwarf Ducasse, Blue Java, Red Dacca, Goldfinger, Mons Marie, Pisang Rajah and Ceylan, and Ladyfinger. A friend had promised me a Gros Michel but moved, (though I haven’t given up getting some suckers), and would like to get monkey bananas and the large cooking plantain that High Falls Farm at Mossman used to sell at Rusty’s.

I live at Ravenshoe and am happy to swap.

Cheers,

Sandi.

As I said last April, I moved from one Mundingburra house to another just over a year ago. I brought with me suckers of the Ducasse which were so successful at the old place, and suckers of the Lady Finger from this clump in South Townsville.

The Blue Java which I nurtured so hopefully for so long had died not long after producing the first bunch I harvested, and the Pisang Ceylan didn’t even get to that stage before succumbing to the Scrub Turkey’s nest-building efforts, so I only have the two varieties. They are doing well in their new home, and with any luck I should get some fruit this year.

I will collect other varieties as opportunities arise but I’m in no hurry: I only have a suburban back yard and it could easily get crowded. Red Dacca and Monkey bananas are near the top of my wish-list but, really, I’m an anything-but-Cavendish grower.

Meanwhile, I receive occasional emails from other readers looking for specific varieties. I’m sorry to say that I can’t help much, since I don’t actually know anyone growing anything I haven’t got (unless this lot is a different Ducasse, as I suspect it may be: the plants make ours look like midgets, so perhaps ours are Dwarf Ducasse and these others are non-dwarf Ducasse).

Blue Sky Backyard Bananas, Tully, are still selling online and they would be the first people I would ask about the less common varieties. There’s also a facebook public group called Oz Rare Fruit which may help. (I have joined it, but so recently that I don’t yet have much of a sense of its activity.)

Other than that, it’s a matter of running into someone who has what you want and is willing to share, so thanks for your offer, Sandi, and I will contact you when I’m travelling in your direction. If any of my readers is also interested in swapping with Sandi I can put you in touch, too.

Growing our own food is very satisfying in itself, but I also like the community-building aspect of it, the sharing and swapping. Let’s keep it going.

Ducasse banana seed – an exceptionally rare find

As most of us know, all of our cultivated bananas are sterile clones and those little black dots in the middle of the fruit are immature seeds which will never develop. Getting a real seed out of a cultivated banana is a really rare event, as we realise immediately when we think about how many bananas we have eaten and how few seeds we have found.

I have been growing Ducasse (sugar) bananas in my back yard for twenty-odd years, occasionally with other varieties, and I hadn’t come across a mature seed in all those years until six weeks ago when I found one seed in each of two bananas from the same bunch. One seed crunched between my teeth but I managed to save the other – roundish, blackish and about 4mm long. Continue reading “Ducasse banana seed – an exceptionally rare find”

Self-sufficiency: bananas

Banana suckers growing around mature trunks
Banana suckers growing around mature trunks (click for larger image)

When we came to this house twenty years ago we came to a somewhat neglected but well established garden. The house was already more than forty years old, a product of the post-war building boom that necessarily accompanied the post-war baby boom, and its first owners had planted a mango tree in the back corner of the yard as everyone did in Townsville in those days. We also found a macadamia tree, grapefruit and lemon trees and (getting to the point of this post) a clump of bananas.

The bananas have flourished with minimal care and have given us more fruit than all the rest put together.

Each plant begins as a sucker from the base of an older one and takes 6 – 12 months to produce a bunch of fruit. Each plant only produces one flower and one bunch, and the remains of the plant simply become mulch and compost after the fruit is cut. Grass clippings are spread amongst the plants as well, but that’s all the feeding they have needed. They do need a lot of water to thrive and they really enjoy the wet season.

Banana bunch and flower
A developing bunch of sugar bananas showing immature fruit above the still-growing flower

The flying foxes normally alert us by visiting when the bunch is ripe enough to pick (and sometimes get a percentage of it if we don’t pay attention) and I go out with a knife on a long pole. I trim the leaves, then cut the trunk at head height to bring the bunch within reach, cut the bunch off and bring it indoors to finish ripening. That usually takes a few days and we then have anything from 20 to 200 bananas which need to be eaten within a week or so. Friends, relations, neighbours and colleagues have learned to expect free bananas from us when we pick a big bunch. That’s okay – the fruit was free to us anyway, and often returns in the form of paw-paws, pomelos or tomatoes from recipients’ gardens.

Bananas are peculiar amongst widely-grown crops in their lack of genetic diversity. Almost all the commercial production is of just one hybrid variety, the Cavendish, and all the plants – worldwide – are clones, meaning that any disease which affects one plant can affect all of them just as seriously, with potentially catastrophic effects on global production (see the excellent Wikipedia article for more on this).

Also, of course, it means that to most people a banana is a banana is a banana in a way that is simply not true of apples, tomatoes, potatoes, etc. As one writer put it, “The diversity of bananas is similar to citrus. Consumers would be aghast if only oranges were available, when they knew about lemons, limes, mandarins, pummelo and grapefruit.”

Ripe sugar bananas on a tray
Ripe Sugar Bananas with morning coffee … mmm

For both reasons we were happy to find that ours are not Cavendish. Eventually we worked out that they are not Lady Fingers either (it always seemed improbable, because ours are much stumpier than Cavendish and surely ladies’ fingers should be slim?), but Sugar Bananas, more formally ‘Ducasse‘. They were apparently introduced to northern Australia from Thailand in the 1880s.

They are a little more acid than Cavendish and the texture is smoother, almost slippery. They are wonderful fresh, and keep well in the fridge (although the blackening of the skin is a bit off-putting) but we haven’t found them to be good in cooking because they go leathery.

We always have more suckers than we need and I’m happy to give them to anyone willing to drop by and pick them up. Just contact me first.

Someday I might write again about other varieties of bananas. Until then, enjoy the fun discussion at chowhound.chow.com.