5 reasons why we planted bananas in our food forest

Last week we got another exciting delivery of plants for our burgeoning food forest from our friends at Twin Falls Nursery. Amongst them were six lady finger banana corms (they look a bit like pork knuckles), the part of the plant that produces offshoots that will become our first banana palms. 

Since Mark read about how other growers have been growing tropical fruit like bananas and pineapples in Northland last year, he has been planning where our own banana circle would go. It required some earthworks in an area of our property that we aren’t currently developing though, so getting these corms in the ground now will allow us to learn about growing bananas in the meantime.  

Here’s why we’ve been so keen to start growing bananas.  

Shade 

A while ago I fell into one of those conversations with my eldest brother where we both regressed to our childhood argumentative selves, vehemently debating, of all things, whether banana palms could create a shady environment. Now every time I see banana palms, like the mature adult I am, I comment to Mark about how much shade they throw. In the context of our food forest though, they’ll form part of the Understory – both providing and benefiting from shade. 

We eat a lot of bananas 

I don’t just mean our household either, I mean in Aotearoa, New Zealand we eat a lot of bananas. Apparently, we’re the highest consumers of bananas in the world per capita, at 18 kgs per person per year. While I’m not sure that we’re pulling out weight in banana eating to that extent, it is one of our favourite fruits. Even so we seem to oscillate between eating the whole bunch as soon as it makes it home from the supermarket and forgetting they’re there.    

Homegrown bananas remind me of my dad 

In my book, Lost Heart Found, I wrote about my dad’s love of growing fruit, including bananas: 

Astoundingly, Dad was home less than a week after emergency brain surgery. The first thing he did was ignore our pleas to rest so he could go outside and wander through the fruit trees at the bottom of the sprawling garden of my childhood home. He loved that garden. I have memories of him bringing harvests of Christmas plums, ugly apples, sour grapes and tart lemons up to the house on his way back from hanging out the washing. He planted banana palms that produced copious amounts of small, unsweet fruit that he was so proud of. He had a love/hate relationship with the macadamia nut tree. He loved drying and roasting the sweet morsels it provided, but he hated the relentless rate at which it dropped nuts that had to be picked up straight away before the field rats beat him to it. He loved taking homegrown fruit in his packed lunch and despaired that his children shied away from the ugly fruit in favour of perfectly round shop bought nectarines. 

I know that when we eat the first bananas from these trees, I’ll feel my dad with me. And I’m also prepared for the bananas to taste weird to me, because I never really liked the ones he grew. 

Reducing the journey  

Eating bananas that are grown in our garden instead of on the other side of the world is in line with our goal to reduce the journey our food takes to get to our plates.

For Gareth 

Just kidding, our friend Gareth hates bananas.