Look What Monkette Found ~ WILD BANANAS!

We had about half an hour to kill before Monkette and I would head over to city hall and listen to the mayoral and council candidates tell us about all the things that they thought we wanted to hear. It would be mostly a litany of self-agrandisement as one after the another would get cut off in mid-sentence by the moderator as they exceeded the alloted two minutes to respond to questions from the audience.

We decided to check out the back yard. Janis had told Monkette that she'd spotted a couple of stalks of bananas in the jungle that passes for our back yard. Code Enforcement hates my back yard, but I keep pointing out that it really looks pretty much the same as the Enchanted Forest park a couple of blocks away. They don't have much of a "lawn" either. One time they tried to cite me for over height "weeds" in the front yard but I made the officer kneel down and identify exactly what kind of "weeds" they were. He agreed with me that they were live oak seedlings, a protected species, and that getting permits at $25 each for a few hundred live oaks would be a major imposition on our banana budget. A week later I mowed the lawn anyway. The fine print exempted newly sprouted acorns.

These banana plants were already growning here when I bought the house back in '67. Some years there are a few stalks, some none. The soil isn't really conducive to raising bananas. There's pretty much solid coral rock just a few inches below the surface and bananas like deep thick rich soil. That's why we can't get a full stalk of fruit. Too little water and not enough nutrients.

These bananas are a small thin skinned variety called "apple bananas", and they have a smell and taste very much like apples. I like them sliced up on a bowl of corn flakes. Monkette just plain likes them! And I suppose we'll share them with Janis. That's probably why we got blessed with two stalks this year.