Going Bananas

Here in Baja the climate is great for growing many types of subtropical plants, including bananas. I have a small collection of banana cultivars, some of which do very well and others are marginal at best. One of my favorites is the Blue Java, or Ice Cream banana. Grown here in my garden has a slight vanilla taste and somewhat of a touch of acid, just enough to make it sprightly… much more interesting than store bought bananas! They are quite small when fully developed, maybe 3-4 inches long. Quite tasty!

I have discovered a lot about how bananas grow from my banana experiments here. Although, I understood that a banana tree, actually a giant stalk, will die after it produces fruit, I didn’t know that one cluster, or mat, of trees can actually have more than one bearing tree at a time. I have an extremely hard time bringing myself to thin my trees, so I usually just let them grow as they will (unless one comes up in my way). As a result, I have mats with sets of trees with various heights (usually three at each level, tall, mid-height, and small pups).

This year, it seems that most of my clusters have large trees with fruit on them that have bloomed about three or four months apart. We have an almost steady supply of bananas, instead of just one gigantic stalk with more fruit than we can se at one time. Although, my solution to that “problem” is just to freeze the excess as slices for smoothies.

I love the way banana trees lend a tropical look to my yard. One of the loveliest things I have discovered is the banana blossom.  I think they look sort of like orchids. What do you think?

Banana blossoms resemble orchids

The Beet Of My Garden

I haven’t written for several weeks because we have been traveling. Before we left on our trip we made what was a fairly large investment for us: hose end water timers. I shopped for them at some of the discount retailers in San Diego (read Wally World). Then I shopped at one of my favorite shopping “malls”, eBay. Happily, I was able to invest in four.

I look at them as an organizational tool for us; we won’t have to remember what we have watered and how many times we have watered it. Now, I am not saying we are forgetful, or anything, but we are not “spring chickens” anymore and watering our yard can easily get away from us.

Speaking of the garden getting away from us, while we were gone the new irrigation system worked so well that our return was greeted not only by waist high weeds, but our tiny vegetable gardens were in overdrive! We regularly grow two or more “crops” each year. In the cool season (notice I didn’t say winter) we grow leafy vegetables like lettuce and “cole” crops such as  broccoli. During our warm season, we grow what I like to call our salsa garden: tomatoes, tomatillos, chiles and peppers (not to mention a variety of squash).

Our weather is very much like the Mediterranean area, temperate all year around. So our winter means that the lowest temperatures we experience are barely 45 degrees Fahrenheit at night. I can’t remember the last time we actually had a frost! We are far more likely to lose a cool season crop to a sudden warm spell in the eighties or nineties, in December.

Anyway, after we had whacked our way through all of the weeds that were happily sucking up the water from our weeping hoses, we found our way to the vegetable gardens. Our broccoli and lettuce were monstrous and happily producing seeds. They went directly into the compost pile. The beets and carrots were, of course, hidden from casual view. A hint was that a few of the beets were shooting up a central stalk. Hmmm…

I decided that I should harvest all of them and make the best of what had survived. I had planted a variety of beets that were different colors, red, gold, white, and stripped. The white beets for the most part were quite fibrous (they were the ones with the seed stalks). The most amazing were the  Red Sangria beets.

The photo here is the largest one I found. I put it on my kitchen scale and it weighed more than three pounds! Surely, after finding the much smaller white ones inedible, this beet would be too tough also… Not so! It was delicious, tender and took us about a week to eat it! Yum!

The monster beet from my garden