Give us a hand - of bananas that is.

Our current house sit, as I have said previously, has an acre of ground, and lots of trees. Among the numerous types of trees are a few banana trees. We are not really very knowledgeable about growing bananas. Before they left, the owners told us to cut them down when the bananas were still green and keep them in the shed to ripen.

Well today was gather the bananas day. This is a fairly well established little group of banana palms, probably all came from one main plant in the beginning. We can see where other old trees have been cut down. Peter got out his trusty hacksaw, unsure of how hard it would be to cut them down.

Well, if you have never cut down a banana palm before, like the teddy bears picnic, you will be sure of a big surprise. The trunk of the main tree was about 8 to 10 inches thick, it was not just a stalk, but a pretty solid looking piece of trunk. After a couple of false starts he cut through that palm with just a couple of movements. It was like cutting butter.

The only way for amateurs to get at the bananas is to chop down the tree, or palm. Once they have borne the fruit, they don't have successive crops. So here the bananas have just landed on the ground.

With his hacksaw in hand he is ready to chop up the stalk into smaller pieces. What he didn't realise until he started was that there were several other older palms that really needed cutting down too. So he made a start only to find that the plants were fabulous water traps, and a wonderful place for ants to  nest.

Now in Aussie an ant is not one of those little tiny things, although we have them too, but we can get ants here up to about an inch n length, green, black, and fire ants, although we have never seen any of them, but they come in many sizes, colours, and bite strengths. Well the ones in today's banana palms were out for a feed, and poor Peter got a goodly number of ant bites. The ones I have had in the past might sting for up to half an hour, so its not just a little nip.

This is a banana flower. It is at the end of the stalk. In our case today, we only got half a stalk of fruit, but I think that often the fruit would fill the whole stalk up.By the way, in case you didn't know, bananas grow upside down on the palm. The bunch of fruit hangs down, but the bananas  actually hang up

.

Here you can see a bunch of bananas still hanging on the tree and the flower at the bottom.
So, we don't have a huge bunch of bananas to look forward to, but we will keep these in the shed for now, and hope to enjoy them before too long. This is a small variety, maybe what is called a 'ladyfinger'. There were a couple of other smaller bunches of fruit, but something had been chewing at them. The bats love them once they get ripe enough to eat.