Who knew you could grow bananas in the Florida Panhandle?

Both houses Todd and I have shared, so far, have had banana trees somewhere on the premises, but they’ve never bloomed and I thought I’d read or heard something them being purely ornamental in all but the most tropical of locations.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the new neighbors joked that we’d need to trade bananas for lemons (their home has a massive lemon tree at the side–did you know lemon trees have thorns?) and there they were, little green bananas hanging down in several places in our little rain forest just off the porch.

From what I can tell, once the individual “hands” have filled out and have turned slightly more yellow-green than pure green (and definitely before the first frost) its time to cut them down and hang them someplace cool. Which will probably be the garage. And, then, once they’ve all been harvested it’ll be time to cut down the stalks that flowered this year, as they only produce once (but the little shoots that pop up just as the old ones die could).

I’ll be sure to keep you posted if we actually get any edible bananas from this year’s “crop.” Since I had nothing to do with their planting, and they seem pretty self-sufficient to have gotten this far, I hope my notorious black thumb won’t prove their downfall, now that I’ve noticed them!