Bananas!

[txcanoegirl]

The last of of our banana harvest...they were good while they lasted, but I'm glad I'm done! We have two varieties, one plant each. Ice Cream Banana & Apple Banana. They don't taste like ice cream or bananas to me...and I can't tell much difference between them, but they are really good. From the two plants, we got SEVEN stalks of bananas...and according to the husband, each stalk weighs 80-100 lbs. Not sure if he's telling the truth or not, but I didn't weigh them! We ate a lot of bananas...I made LOT of banana bread...for snacking and the freezer. I pureed a lot of bananas to make a LOT of banana bread later. This is our first time to grow them. Second year to have the plants. The first year they didn't produce early enough to mature before the cold weather hit. We had to protect them from the cold and when the temps were predicted to be too low, the stalks were cut and hung from the rafters of the shed, with a little heat in the shed.

The bananas aren't fully mature here...they got quite a bit larger before we had to cut them off for storage...

The photo is just PART of ONE stalk of bananas. One of the differences between these and store-bought...when store bought bananas look spotted, they are usually bruised on the inside. With the home grown ones, it didn't matter how dark or spotted the peel was...the inside flesh was creamy white and unblemished!

 

[deacon]

Wish I could grow them. I have several plants and they produce fruit, but they always freeze before they are ready. I am in central Florida. Glad for your luck!

 

[txcanoegirl]

We are in zone 8b. We noticed the first fruit around the beginning of August and started putting frost covers over them in the fall when it started dropping to about 50 degress or so. When it starts getting cold, the maturation process slows down. We knew they would not have time to ripen on the plant before it got too cold, but they had to be mature enough to ripen off the plant once cut. We left them until we knew it was supposed to freeze. At that point, we cut all the stalks off and moved them to the shed and hung them to ripen. We kept a small heater in there for cold nights. It seems like it was around the first part of December when we cut the stalks off. At one point we were about to give up on them getting ripe, then it just started happening and they all ripened over a period of several weeks. It certainly wasn't effortless...but it was worth the effort! We also fertilized them every week.

 

[Wannabefree]

That's a lotta bananas!! I love bananas, but I'd never have the patience to grow them in my climate I could eat that many too!!!

 

[Emerald]

Nice haul! A neighbor down the road from me when I lived in Florida had three or four types of bananas and I know ice cream was one and it was fantastic and they also had little fat almost round ones that I have no idea what the name was they were fantastic too! I just have a dwarf potted banana. it never does anything but put out baby plants and die back in the winter and pop back to beautiful in the summer.

 

[okra]

Terrific harvest. We had a lovely banana cake yesterday and it would have been great to use homegrown ones.

 

[Denim Deb]

Nice! I don't think I could grow them here, though.

 

[TanksHill]

How cool is that? Very nice!!!

 

[ORChick]

Nice crop! I wasn't aware that a banana plant would produce so many at once. DH, who does not generally show interest in the fruit I dry (meaning, I have to transform it into "dessert" for him to eat it), cleaned me out of several jars of dehydrated banana chips just over the last few days. He really loved them.

 

[txcanoegirl]

Y'all have to remember that the photo is just a tiny fraction of the whole harvest! That is only part of one stalk...and we had SEVEN stalks from the two plants!

I dehydrated some of the bananas into chips, but found we don't care much for them. I made fruit leathers, too. I don't eat them much, but I roll them up tootsie roll fashion with parchment paper for snacks in my husband's lunch.

Slices of banana bread also go in his lunch. He's tall and lean, but works hard and likes dessert!

The BEST jam I have ever made was the Kraft Certo recipe for Strawberry-banana jam. I'll never be able to duplicate it because I basically cleaned out my freezer of all of last year's berries...strawberries, blackberries and dewberries and ran them through my ROMA sauce maker with the berry screen. The small amount of banana the recipe calls for is pureed and packs a lot of flavor into the jam. I gave away two of the jars and wish I had them back. It was that good. Since it wasn't all strawberry, I renamed it Berry-Berry-Banana! Ding, ding, ding, We Have a Winner! It was even better when spread on slices of the banana bread!

I think I'll have to start another thread for the other fruit trees we have in our fledgling orchard! That guy of mine has plans for about 80 fruit trees in addition to what I already had here. We've planted about 30 so far of the 80. Of the ones planted so far...figs (4 varieties), pumelo ( I don't even know what that is), satuma, orange (2 or 3 varieties), kumquat, loquat, avocado, pomegranate (5 varieties), mulberry (2), bananas (2 varieties), cherries of the rio grande, barbados cherry, dragon fruit, blackberries, grapes (5 varieties). That's all in addition to the pears (3), blackberries (old fashioned variety), dewberries (wild on my fence), figs (2). We also have 23 productive pecan trees and 1 walnut tree. I've only seen 2-3 walnuts on it, so I don't know if I can call it productive or not!

Jill