FruitandVeggiesMonday: Harvesting My Own Homegrown Bananas + How To Ripen Them

You can’t beat the flavor of homegrown bananas, cultivated and looked after with lots of ღ ღ ღ. Besides that, you know for sure no poisons have been used in their growth. Win-win!

Finally, after months of waiting the first bananas are ripened and ready to consume on this beautiful #FruitandVeggiesMonday hosted by the gorgeous @lenasveganliving. Woot Woot.

I am always so excited when we are able to eat the fruits of our land. Although we are far from being true homesteaders, we are learning every day and slowly we will get to the point that our land can provide the food we eat. I am already dreaming of that day.

Unfortunately, the beautiful 2 hectares of land packed with tropical fruit trees we call our home right now is not our own, so we will be limited in extending the land to our needs.... in the meantime, however, we'll keep looking to find a spot on this blue planet we can truly call ours and home...

Until then we keep planting trees and foods just for the joy and tasty treats they'll give us or the people who will live here after us.

But let's talk bananas right now!

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These babies are the first to have ripened and are going into a smoothie tomorrow!

Banana growing

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Bananas do not grow from a seed but from a bulb or rhizome. A banana tree takes about 9 to 12 months to grow up and produce a bunch of bananas. After that, the plant will not produce any bananas and often the mother plant will die. But around the base of the mother plant you will find many suckers or little baby plants that will grow up again and get you new bananas in the coming months.

Though we missed the flowering period for these bananas as we moved in only 2 months ago, here are some pics of the beautiful banana flowers on other plants in the garden. Just to give you an idea how the whole banana growing at home story starts.

Banana flowers are edible and make great salads but we just prefer to let them grow and produce big bunches of small tropical bananas.

After a while the purple flower petals will curl back and drop off, revealing a "hand" of bananas underneath. You may get anything between four to a dozen or more full hands.

Banana harvesting

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Harvest homegrown bananas while the fruit is still green and unripe. You know when to harvest when the bananas look well rounded with ribs, and the little flowers at the end are dry and rub off easily.

Ripening requires a precise balance between ethylene gas, temperature and storage conditions. When the bananas are mature but still green, they begin to produce ethylene gas. This gas functions as a natural hormone that triggers the ripening process. Ethylene gas produced by the bananas is trapped around the ripening fruit by bagging the bananas in bags.

Keep the bags out of direct sunlight and at a stable warm temperature between 53F to 74F (12C and 24C) for optimal ripening conditions. Where we live it is usually well above 74F but that's still ok as long as the temperature is stable. Warmer temperatures just speed up the ripening.

My loving hubby got them down from the tree and then we put them in a bag for a few days.

This is the result. More to come.... already had a pre-taste and they are yum! I can just taste the love hehe!

That's it for today! Thanks for reading. I wonder what the garden will bring us next week.

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ALL CONTENT IS MINE AND ORIGINAL!
PICTURE(s) TAKEN WITH NIKON D5600

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