50 Pound Banana Bunch!

 

Bananas 2020!

It's been an epic year for bananas.... with the mild winter, the mats exploded with a zillion bunches.  We have had non-stop ripe bananas for many weeks, and there's no end in sight since there are about 10 "almost ready" bunches still on the plants.

This batch is special, as it's the first REALLY NICE bunch from Blue Ice Cream!  They are not quite ripe, but they look like they'll be amazing.  They're about 6" long and plump.

The other bananas are from various other super high producing banana plants. 

I've had so many ripe bananas, I invented a delicious new recipe:  Use a fork to smash VERY ripe bananas, mix with a little flax seed, freeze it, and slice it into little mini ice cream bites.  No other ingredients, and it's stunningly good!  WAY better than just eating a banana!

Blue Ice Cream bananas harvested 7/18/2020

Another view of Blue Ice Cream.... not the biggest bunch ever, but wow it's going to provide 40-50 bananas, all ripening within a few days :D

All of the current harvested bananas on the ripening hooks.

Four Banana Bunches on One Plant... New Record! 11/5/2019

Ho 2 has four banana bunches on one plant/mat.  Amazing!  These three Home Depot generic banana plants (probably dwarf cavendish) are incredibly prolific, but four on one is amazing.  And they're 35 pound bunches... not 50-100 lbs, but I'm glad because that would be WAY too big for me to harvest!

BANANA HANGERS

HANGING BANANAS UP TO RIPEN

We've struggled with ripening bananas. If they sit on a table then ants get on them. Opossums have climbed up the supports in our pole-barn to eat our delicious yummy fruit.

It takes a while for the bananas to ripen, sometimes a month or more. So what to do with them while we wait, we don't have space in the kitchen for several 30-35 pound bunches of bananas.

The solution, while simple, involves a little bit of backbreaking labor.

The short answer is, we embedded "Shepherds Hook" plant hangers in concrete which was poured in Home Depot 5-gallon pails. Each bucket has roughly 80 pounds of concrete in it to make it stable with bunches of bananas hanging on the hook.

A design trick I borrowed from the Butterfly Sanctuary in St Martin, I placed the hooks out away from the bucket side so that we can put two-inches of water in the bucket after the concrete set up. The water creates a barrier that ants hate. Mary and I have a $100 bet as to whether the ants will swim the short distance to get to our yummy bananas. Only time will tell.

Mary cuts the "hands" of bananas and then puts a long wire-tie through the hand so it can easily be added to a "Ripening Hook".

When we first started growing banana plants we never thought we'd ever be eating our own bananas. We're growing the best tasting bananas available anywhere. They are so flavorful and sweet, much more yummy than even the organic bananas from the grocery stores.

We're currently in the testing phase to evaluate how this system works.

Advantages: Portable, low cost, easy to use

Disadvantages: Heavy, not easy to move

Two Inches of water in top of bucket keeps ants away, they hate swimming :-)

Hanger post is 3/4" away from bucket, there is clear water on top of the concrete to create an Ant Free barrier
Without the water ants will find there way up the hook to the bananas above

The hooks are only rated for 10 pounds of weight but in this setup we've hung 30-35 pound bunches

Bananas!

BANANAS WE GREW IN 2019
This is not all of them but WOW. At $2/pound we made $80 of organic bananas in this bunch alone

Banana Count

This post is all about answering the question "how many bananas"?  But first a few things....

This week was an epic milestone... I got my first offer to buy some P2 bananas!

Plus our friend Bruce asked Mark "how many banana plants do you have"?  Mark's answer was "I have no idea" LOL.  I actually had no idea either!

On Thursday Brock of Florida Fields to Forks brought my delivery of produce share and fruit share, and asked me if I have extra bananas to sell.  I'll have to admit, I have been struggling for years to get past hobby banana grower and to a point where I could reliably have fruit to eat all year.  With the warm winter we had 2018/2019, the bananas at P2 are doing AMAZING.  We had some high winds in a storm yesterday, bringing a banana bunch to the ground so I had to go harvest this morning.  When I went to pick up the banana bunch, it was VERY HEAVY.  I used all my strength to lift it up into LEM's trailer and get it back to the screened in porch so it can ripen safely away from the deer and squirrels.  Once I got in back, Mark and I weighed it... 35 lbs!  Weeeeeeeeeeee.  This bunch is from Swamp Baby, which is an offspring from Swamp King.  Swamp King was once of my first bananas that I bought online.  I put the bananas in several different locations at P2 as kind of a science experiment to see how they did.  Poor Swampy got stuck in 100% water in a very wet location.  When I rescued him a year later, he was just fine, and spent some time in the pool cage before he got a place of honor in Palm Beach.  Anyhow, Swamp King's baby (Swamp Baby) has made some incredible bananas.  35 lbs!

So, how many bananas?  I did a walkabout and counted this morning.  Every pup counts as one.  We have 200 banana plants!  So yep, I think it's highly likely that I'll have some extra bananas to sell or barter very soon.  The banana log will help me to know when it's time to harvest them.

I did a bit of research this morning, and wholesale prices for specialty organic bananas are about $1 a pound.  Not bad!  

Marys new banana installation, Sunday 5-12-19 Mothers Day, with Steve Dalbow's assistance

BIRTHDAY BED FOR CROOKED COCO PALM

FUN WITH RAISED BEDS

Landscape timber inventory from Home Depot, we love delivery!

I always loved playing with Lincoln Logs when I was a child, now I'm using power tools and landscape timbers to build raised beds that look cool and provide unique functionality.

Crooked Palm next to newly constructed raised bed

We've had this little coco palm in a pot all his life, his name is "Crooked", we got him in the specials section at Home Depot. He was clearly crooked after emerging from his nut, he looked terrible and that made him an irresistible deal, like picking up a cat at the Humane Society on his last day.

Crooked has had to weather a couple of hurricanes but he has hung in there and continued to grow. Finally I figured out how and where we could plant him, in a location of honor where we can see him every day and watch him grow into a big beautiful tree.

The Paradise Beach end of the pond is filled with tree roots from oaks and other trees we had removed to clear the landscape. It is impossible in some places to dig down at all so this leaves only one solution, build up, in this case, a log cabin style, bottomless pot made from landscape timbers.

Mary and I used my new Makita chainsaw to cut 10 timbers in half, these would be the 20 pieces needed to build a four-foot by four-foot bottomless pot.

I joined the timbers together using 4" coated screws which were counter sunk 2" into the log above the one being screwed in to. I used three screws per log, with one at each end and one in the middle. This proved to be very sturdy with no need to move up to heavier screws or hardware.

Final completed installation

I removed about 75% of the grass at the base of the pot, the remaining 25% was too embedded in roots to extract it in the 85 degree and 85% humid air. It had drizzled for an hour earlier and it drizzled some while I was installing the palm, making the project all the more miserable to complete. Unlike the day before there was zero breeze in the morning, just wet thick air.

I lined the base of the pot with moist cardboard boxes to act as weed block. The center area under the palm was not covered but the all the rest was covered with a double-layer of cardboard, which will be all rotted and virtually gone in three months.

"Crooked" in his new home

It was great to finally give Crooked Coco a home, he's been in that pot for at least two years, now he has a nice big home to expand into and spread his wings into the sky.

This view shows the house end where we watch from

OTHER PARADISE BEACH PROJECTS

Mary's Canna plant on Paradise Beach. 

Mary has planted a Canna down on the Paradise Beach end of the pond. The LED solar lights are cheapie's from the Dollar Store, we won't be buying them again, they're very low output.

Laying out the landscape on Paradise Beach

ABOVE: A wider view of the Paradise Beach garden project, the water is off to the right. I'm still in the design process and working on the exact layout of the perimeter of this landscape project.

Here is a view of Pardise Beach landscape bed and the banana field which lies just beyond.

IRRIGATION NOTE: One Rainbird Impact sprinkler on a five-foot riser pipe waters this entire area. It is so great to be able to give all the area plants a drink, especially during the drought and lack of real rain we're currently experiencing.

VIEW FROM THE KITCHEN

View from our kitchen

This is what we see when we look out across the pond from our kitchen, Palm Island on the right, Big Hedo (the huge Bird of Paradise on the left), the new raised bed with Crooked coco palm in the center and Date just to the right of the raised bed.

View from our kitchen at night

PALM ISLAND UPDATE
The Palm Island project has been one of my favorite builds on our property. We've embellished it with solar powered LED lighting and so it's beautiful to look at both day and night.

Palm Island

Palm Island is home to a Traveler Palm which we grew from a seed (on the right). There's also a big sabal palm and a coco palm we raised in a pot for two years. "Baby Phil" is in the white pot on the left by the sabal palm and Pom Pom is in a brown pot on the right, blocking the neighbors driveway light.

DATE, this beautiful palm was trapped under a massive overgrowth of pepper trees and  invasive plants

"Date" (that's the name we gave him) is actually several date palms all growing together. It's impossible to separate them so we embrace the whole family and welcome them to our landscape. It's a joy seeing their massive fronds swaying and swooshing around in the Florida Breeze.

Massive Queen Palms in our neighbors yard rise in the background and increase the tropical look we love.

The Great Freeze of 2018

Wow, time flies, I haven't posted any banana pictures since November 2017 since the weather has been amazing and we've been doing all kinds of projects outside in the beautiful 75-80 degree weather every weekend (actually, every Sunday since I have been working every Saturday...).  The bananas have been epic in size, health, and beauty, and I've just been enjoying them rather than photographing them.

Every January here in Melbourne, Florida, it gets COLD.  We hadn't had a freeze since 2014, and I guess I always hope for the best (no more freezes, no more hurricanes...  I'm 0 for 2 now with my "hoping"!).  But it was bound to happen, and the good thing is that now I'm confident that my bananas and papayas (and all of the tropical plants for that matter) can put up with 30 degrees F for a few hours for a few nights in a row and survive.

The banana leaves are a different story... they all suffered some sort of damage.  Mark and I did a survey around the park yesterday, and we agreed that the bananas that did well through this freeze need to be propagated, duplicated and spread everywhere... they're the ones that REALLY belong here!

Here's some examples of frost damage from the 30 degree low temperature 1/4/2018 (and a couple of 30 something nights which followed).

This is another Mona Lisa, added to the banana circle late summer 2017 to replace a wimpy banana.  She got a tree limb as a crutch after the hurricane to brace her and to allow her to strengthen.  She's fine overall but her leaves got melted in the freeze.  Other banana circle leaves had varying levels of damage, but the overall plant is fine.

Big Mick (actual lineage unknown) is gorgeous, really tall and tropical.  His leaves (upper left) just melted in the freeze, with rusty brown replacing healthy green.  Oddly, though, his big pup, Baby Mick, looks great!  What cold, was it cold?  LOL

This banana plant is fruiting and would probably have bananas ready to eat by February if the freeze hadn't happened.  We're leaving the bananas on the tree - they're gorgeous, they might be ok, and we'll never know unless we leave them there and see if they ripen into delicious bananas.  This is another "what kind of banana is this?" plant.  Check the rusty leaves out...

Big Mike (Gros Michel) did great through the freeze.  He's our entry banana, we love him and enjoy his huge leaves.  Ok, the leaves got pretty messed up, but he and his babies are fine.  He'd have more pups, but I harvested three pups a few weeks ago.  They're in pots in the back, looking just fine after the freeze.  Big Mike is HUGE - like 16 feet tall - and he's one of the bananas we want all over the property.

This is Mona of early Mona Lisa batch in 2016... well, Mona mat, that is, since the original Mona Lisa made delicious bananas last year and these are her pups.  The three pups from Mona look TERRIBLE after the freeze...  wow, she's probably the worst of them all.  We'll be watching to see what happens.  But my bet is that all of them are fine, they'll grow new leaves, and we'll forget about this ugly moment in their history. 

Lows this past week were:

1/4/2018    30 degrees F
1/5/2018    34 degrees F
1/6/2018    38 degrees F

And right now, it's 69 degrees F outside and I'm back in a tank top :)

PAPAYAS, BANANAS AND TREE FROGS, THANKSGIVING 2017

We had so much fun working on our farm over the Thanksgiving holiday. We moved over seventy 50-pound bags of top soil and another fifty 35-pound bags of mulch (we don't need no gym membership).

Our papaya named Herme (after Futurama character), making fruits 

Making bananas the all natural way

One of our four currently flowering banana plants

Home Depot $10 banana plant, a good deal, making bananas

Love the rich color of the banana flower, the bananas form under the petals of the flower

A little frog hanging out on Herme the Papaya

This little guy is less than an inch long

Frogs are down in each of the banana leaves looking for bugs to eat

Every banana leaf has water and a frog in it

P2 is a magical place bristling with life everywhere you look.

WILDLIFE, FRUITS AND PLANTS

Another beautiful day here at P2. These photos were taken Sunday, November 19th.

Look at all that fluffiness

Two boys wandering our farm

A mallard going into breeding colors

flowers in the Fall

Pip, Pop and Peep the papayas

Date palm continues to get more healthy

Mary reveals a freshly emerged banana flower

The trunk of the banana plant must be big enough to pass the flower out full size

the flower bends over due to weight

Note how the bananas start out red when the flower petal peels back but then they turn green

A Home Depot banana making bananas, now that's a good deal

Big Mike, stands sentry duty by entry gate to our property

We also planted three banana plants and two bamboo plants today. The bamboo were propagated from our "original recipe" bamboo that came with our property. We had forgotten them and they were lost in some tall grass. In spite of no water and being in pots these two plants survived so we gave them a wonderful new home. Photos to follow.

Mary's Update Monday, November 20th:  One the way home today, coming up the driveway, I glanced over at Home Depot 2 (lovingly called Ho2) and was stunned to see that the very upright flower shown in the above picture emerging very high out of the plant (where I had to reach up and pull a leaf aside to see it) is now hanging over, ready to start making bananas.  This is one day of change!  You seriously have to look every day or you miss the magical evolution of the flower turning into bananas.  Love it!