Tag: Lady Finger Banana

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”

Bananas – nature and nurture

Six years ago I rescued some suckers from a neglected South Townsville garden and planted them in my own. Two years ago I rescued some more when we moved house, to plant them in my new garden. This week I found myself with a bunch from the original (still neglected) patch and a bunch from my new patch, and here they are, side by side.

large and small bananas
Genetically identical

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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.

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More bananas

banana clump
The banana clump before clean-up – obviously healthy but choked with dead leaves and whole plants

An environmental group I volunteer with has its office in an old (1920s) house whose backyard has always had mango trees (every North Queensland gardener from 1900 until at least 1950 started his garden by saying, “Let’s plant the mango tree here“) and a patch of bananas.

They were left alone when the rest of the garden was put into low-maintenance mode (lawn in sunny areas, mulch under the trees) and three weeks ago, prompted by the sight of a bunch ready to pick, I spent half an hour beginning to clean them up, returning home with a small bunch of bananas and a moral obligation to go back and finish the clean-up. When I went back ten days later to do that I found another bunch ripe enough to cut down and brought half of it home, leaving the other half for Centre staff and volunteers.

They are good bananas, too, although I’m not yet sure which variety they are.

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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.

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