Tag: banana

What to do about too many bananas (2)

We love our home-grown bananas but dealing with a big bunch is challenging. A few months ago I wrote about ways of making good use of hundreds of bananas at once but here’s a different kind of response to the challenge.

Q. How do you stop all the bananas from ripening at once?

This question came up on a great facebook page for keen backyard banana growers (facebook.com/groups/bananagrowingenthusiasts) and got a lot of useful replies. I have grouped them for convenience and extended them with my own knowledge and further research. So, with thanks to Geoff, Penelope, Lindy and Michael, here we go.

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The elusive Musa jackeyi

Ten years ago I introduced the readers of Green Path to Australia’s two species of wild banana, Musa banksii and Musa jackeyi. At that time I had seen the former growing in rainforest several times but hadn’t tried the fruit. I hadn’t even seen the latter.

I eventually tried the fruit of M. banksii, but I still haven’t seen M. jackeyi. Odd snippets of information have come my way, however, and I thought it was time to pull them all together, supplementing them with what further information I could find online.

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Extreme latitude bananas

Bananas are the world’s most popular tropical fruit so it’s not surprising that people have attempted to grow them further and further from the equator.

Commercial crops are grown wherever they grow well enough. Beyond that, keen home gardeners make special efforts to nuture their plants. Some of them just like a challenge, but browsing relevant social media suggests that many of them are migrants from tropical countries and are simply trying to grow what they had in their gardens back home.

In seeing how far bananas can go, I will note latitudes beside place names. Logically, distance from the equator should be decisive regardless of whether we’re moving North or South. Let’s see.
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What to do with too many bananas

Bunch of bananas on a table
15 kg of Ladyfingers, just picked

We love our home-grown bananas but a large bunch can be challenging. A big bunch might be 15 or even 20 kilos, up to two hundred bananas, and the time between the first fruit being ripe enough and the last being too overripe to eat isn’t much over a week. What can you do with them?

We’ve been working on answers for a few years. Cakes, breads and slices are my main focus here because I’ve been collecting recipes and experimenting with them recently, but I will briefly cover other options at the end.    Continue reading “What to do with too many bananas”

Dwarf bananas reverting to tall type

Can dwarf bananas revert to the tall variety? It seems to have happened with a backyard banana patch I help to look after.

When my friend bought the house four years ago it had a well-cared-for circle of Dwarf Ducasse but he allowed it to escape at one side so that it is now a Q with a very long tail. The plants in that tail are all much taller and trunks are not quite so fat, but the fruit are still Ducasse.

Every plant in the tail is tall. There are no in-between plants, and the suckers can be distinguished when they are only knee-high. Dwarf suckers have fatter trunks and more leaves (and the leaves turn out more) than the ‘tall’ suckers.

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