Happy Monday! Not that many of you have been near here, but it's been a little bit windy lately. Not a lot windy, but just a little bit. This was noticable when we went over to the rental house to get some more work done on it.
Our previous renters bought a house so they moved to their new house and now that we're between renters, we've been getting some projects done while the house is empty. It's much easier to work a house when it's not full of stuff! The railing around the back deck was my last big project, now the current project is just rehabbing the front gardens. They'd become totally over grown and are needing some serious weeding. Takes a pick axe to get these weeds. But it was in the back garden where I noticed the wind damage.
I've never seen bananas blown off a banana plant before. Usually the plant will fall over before the stem will break. That stem is tough, for it to actually break is amazing.
The Chinese Dwarf is one of my favorite bananas. As you can see, they produce ginormous stalks of bananas. This variety of banana tree is pretty short, which considering the name is Chinese "Dwarf", you probably already guessed that. Some bananas can get to twenty feet tall or more which makes it difficult to get the bananas when they're ripe but the Chinese Dwarf is only about half that tall. Which means the Chinese Dwarf not only has huge racks of bananas, but it has them within reach, too. In this case, what with the wind and all, we didn't even need to cut it down, they were already on the ground waiting for us.
I dunno how many of you grow bananas, but they are a pretty strange plant. They aren't actually a tree at all, although frequently we will call it a 'banana tree'. Technically, I think they are a perennial herb with a psuedostem, if we're being picky about what they are. They are really heavy feeders and grow in a clump from a big mat of roots. There are usually several big psuedostems (made of tightly rolled leaves) which are the 'trees' which make the fruit. There's usually several keiki or small shoots coming up along the side of the big stalks and those small shoots will become the next 'tree' when the tall ones fruit and die off. When you want to get one to transplant somewhere else, it takes a lot of digging to get that particular bit of keiki root detached from the rest of them.
We didn't weigh the whole stalk of bananas, but there were thirteen hands on it and they were all pretty decent sized hands. It weighed a lot more than a fifty pound bag of bunny feed. I can hoist those, but this stalk of bananas was not something that could be lifted easily. It was even a bit difficult to drag it out of the underbrush. I'm guessing ninety to a hundred and ten pounds of bananas, plus or minus. Which is a LOT of bananas. We will give some away, freeze some and make a lot of smoothies. They dehydrate nicely, too, into either strips or chips although it's easier to freeze them.
This is a different Chinese Dwarf on the other side of the yard which is just starting to make another bunch of bananas. I should measure it to see how big that thing is, probably it's about two feet long and a foot or more wide. Which is partly why I think James Michener didn't know what he was talking about when he mentioned Hawaiian girls with 'banana flowers' in their hair. Somehow I think he hadn't actually seen anyone wearing one of these in their hair.
As you can see in the picture, as the 'petals' of the 'flower' open up, there's a new hand of bananas forming under each 'petal'. The actual flowers aren't open in the picture, I should try to take another one when one of the flowers is open. They'd be at the ends of each banana. One of the easiest ways to know when a banana is making the next stalk of bananas is to notice a big pile of the dark maroonish red 'petals' as they drop off the new stalk of bananas. It takes months, though, from the time the stalk starts until it's ripe so even though it's in flower now, there won't be new bananas for quite some time.
Well, Darkstar was supposed to have a litter yesterday but it didn't show up. I don't think she was thrilled with her new digs, perhaps, although with bunnies there could be all sorts of reasons why not, I suppose. She'd been with her son, Zorro, in a flat bottomed hutch space, but for having a litter, she needed her own space. I suppose I should have taken Zorro out and just given her a traditional flat bottomed nest box in the area she had already become accustomed to. She doesn't seem to approve of the dropped nesting area.
The first thing she did was dig everything out from the nest area. It had been full of wool mixed with dried grasses. But she didn't seem to approve of that. So, I added a towel and put the wool back in. She promptly pulled all the wool out again, although she left the towel in there. It's not Darkstar's wool, maybe she doesn't approve of it because is smells wrong? So I gave her a whole pile of grass and put that in with the towel. She promptly pulled that out of there, but still left the towel. So I haven't a clue what she prefers.
She's not had any babies so I suppose she can redecorate her hutch space however she finds appropriate. If she doesn't have them within the next day or two, she will go meet another boy bunny and we can start over. This time I'll let her stay in that space so she has a lot more time to get used to it. Maybe changing spaces several days before babies are due is what she's objecting to? Who knows, bunnies can be very strange critters.
She has rather managed the crazy red eye look pretty well, though, don't you think?