Black Bananas

So about 2 years ago I bought a banana plant. It was a very tiny plant, barely 3 leaves. I put the banana plant in the corner of my front garden thinking that if it grew, it might provide some shade for my lettuce and other leafy greens. I knew nothing about banana plants when I bought this little bundle of leaves. I should probably clarify at this point and say – I STILL know nothing about banana plants.

Over time the banana plant grew and grew. It started to create off-shoots which I have since learned is something that banana plants do. Some website actually encourage you getting a stake and staking the new offshoots as they come up as if they are vampires ready to suck your blood (unless they are the True Blood vampires or the Twilight vampires in which I guess you wouldn’t want to stake them? I seem to be digressing). The reason you stake the budding offshoots is so they don’t take energy away from the main banana plant that you want to flower and create bananas. I of course did not know that at the time and let the off-shoots grow. Life progressed and we ended up with 3 large banana plant offshoots.

Finally this year our banana tree (yes, it is now a tree) finally grew its first batch of baby bananas. We were so excited. I danced around and started googling how long until I would have bananas that we could eat. Weeks – yes weeks – went by as I watched my baby bananas start to grow and plump up. Then, we got a cold snap. My bananas turned black. I picked one to see if maybe they were ripe inside despite what the outside looked like. Nope – my poor bananas were not ripe. They were not fully developed. They were not plump, sweet and delicious.

So about 2 years ago I bought a banana plant. I currently have a banana tree. The only bananas I have – are from Costco.

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