Saturday, August 21, 2010

I Scream! You Scream!

We harvested our second bunch of bananas today. This bunch had been growing on our "Ice Cream" banana plant for several months. We had been hoping that it would ripen up when we had our company at the beginning of this month. Alas! it did not, and now I suppose I will have eat them myself. (Pause to sigh.)

Last weekend, we had a pretty severe, local storm, and the trunk of the plant on which hung our bunch "folded." The expert advice at We Be Bananas on such a development is simply to leave the trunk alone and not try to prop it up. The bunch will simply continue to ripen.


The expert advice is also that a shock may cause the bunch to finish ripening up quickly. And so it did. All of a sudden the green bananas moved to a bright yellow.

The photos show the folded plant; my cutting away with a little saw "hands" of bananas from the stalk; and Carol in the kitchen washing them off. We plan on giving a "hand" or two to our next door neighbors, a couple about our age who are of Cuban descent and loved the bananas from our last bunch. We will also take some to church tomorrow.

Carol wisely refrained today buying the usual half dozen or so hands she gets at Publix every Saturday (I expect the stock price to plunge on Monday), so we will eat some of our bananas during the coming week and freeze the rest.

2 comments:

But it's raining in my heart! said...

That's a lot of banana's. Do you do smoothies?

Paul Stokes said...

We love smoothies! And these "ice cream" bananas make the best. No sugar need be added to suit our tastes. But last night we combined chunks of mango with the banana. Fresh mangoes are all over the neighborhood, and we are getting gifts of them, as we have no tree of our own.