# Banana Harvest

Bananas are one of the most productive, useful & easy to grow SHTF plants in the sub tropics.

This lot would weigh an easy 13-15kg & took very little effort on my part. All I really did was get up a ladder & bag the hand about 4-5 months ago (to protect from fruit bats). No fertilizer or watering. I'll occasionally go through and remove dead leaves & excess suckers/pups from the clump.

Once the stem has fruited, it dies making way for the next stem. I chop it down when harvesting & use it as a high water mulch.

Some of the green bananas that broke off were peeled & fried in tallow. They taste very similar to a potatos when cooked like this.

The only problem is trying to get through that many bananas (they all tend to ripen at once).

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Discussion

If you have septic tank and drain field, plant on drain field

Yeah I've got septic. I've got bananas near where it drains to but not directly in it. Where they are right now gets run off from the driveway.

I have a dwarf variety now that I think will be easier to manage. If they go well, I'll be propogating them rather than the ones that are already established.

I'm gonna plant so many bananas!

Just go bananas man! But they do apparently like the extra nitrogen and that’s generically good for soil as well cause they absorb it so win win

my kids (and I) love fried green bananas! 🌱

we make banana ice cream with cocoa when they are very ripe.

I knew about plantains but I had never tried cooking green bananas until recently. It's just not something that we tend do here.

They're really great! I sliced them thinly & made tasty crisps. I also sliced them into cubes to make chunky fat wedges. I couldn't believe that they didn't have that typical banana flavour.

Yeah, you ain't growing bananas where we are.

We're lucky to grow cacti RN.

It's actually the frosts that would probably prevent you from growing them where you are.

They do love water but their trunks collect & store a lot of water. There's a lady that's growing them in lightning ridge (semi arid). She basically had to establish a small forest around them first. This year I'm growing them in the dryer parts of my block, it will be interesting to see how they go. We have wet summers but long dry winters. I'll be using them to help support my citrus & other fruit trees through the dry spells.

I'm a lazy gardener though. Why put in heaps of time/effort trying to grow something that's not suited to your area? There's so many European plants that I can't grow easily here for various reasons. I see plants as survival food for when times are tough. Eventually I'll get some pigs to help convert the plants into real food.