28 December 2014

Bananas as finger food

     Red banana trees may grow taller than yellow banana trees but red bananas themselves are little - they're short and stubby compared to the fruit of most yellow bananas.
     But the fruit of at least one of the varieties of yellow bananas we grow at False Bluff could be considered finger food...it's tiny!  Even the small red bananas are bigger than these babies.




21 December 2014

Papaya flower

     Up close and personal.





14 December 2014

Red bananas

      Never ate one of these until my adventures began in Nicaragua...never even knew there were such things as red bananas. Short and stubby, the flesh of the banana isn't what's red, it's the skin. The eating part of the banana is a cream, almost white, colored flesh and the taste is very sweet.  The bananas shown here are not from False Bluff because most of our red banana trees are only recently planted.


     Back in Virginia I found some red bananas offered in a local grocery store and bought a few to enjoy a taste I'd gotten to know in Bluefields...and found that eating these that had landed in Virginia was like eating the bottom of a tennis shoe. This probably had something to do with the fact that it must have taken weeks to get the bananas to Richmond; and that by then they'd kind of lost their freshness...but that's only a guess.
     It took a couple of years for us to find some starter plants since no one in the Bluefields area seemed to grow this type of banana. I think our starters came from one of the Corn Islands. Wherever we got them, I'm glad they're part of our growing collection of fruit trees.
     Here's one of the newly planted trees (with a stick marking its location so we don't walk on the baby).
week one...
week two...
week three...
(you get the idea)

     And here's the oldest one we've got which will probably produce in a few months. A red banana tree grows taller than the trees that produce the more commonly known yellow bananas. Here it's stretching for the sun. We're planting a lot of bananas in the right of way, because even the taller ones won't ever be a threat to the power lines.


     Interestingly, the stalk of the banana tree is red, sort of like  the trunk of a plantain tree.  Here are shots of a red banana tree and a yellow banana tree growing companionably side-by-side at False Bluff.
Red banana tree trunk


Yellow banana tree trunk



   


04 December 2014

In the sand

     Tracks, shells, and crab house....