Island-Grown Delicacies
Wednesday, August 12th, 2009Although I love the thought of eating food fresh from the garden, the fact is, some foods taste no better when you grow them yourself. For example, I’ve never thought a home-grown carrot tasted any better than store-bought. It makes it hard for me to want to spend the time involved in gardening, especially during Florida’s warmer months. However, there are some foods that grow here with almost no attention, and they taste far better than store bought. We acquired two such delicacies with our Anna Maria Island property when we bought it ten years ago.
When we met at the lawyer’s office to close on the purchase of our new home, I asked the previous owner if it were necessary to water anything in the yard. Completely new to Florida, I had absolutely no experience or knowledge of landscaping and gardening on Anna Maria Island. “If you want bananas, you’d better water those,” he said. That was all.
Since then, we have done very little watering, including of the bananas that grow along the property line. Every once in awhile, when it’s been extremely dry, we give them a little water. Every year or so, we give them a little fertilizer. When we cut off the old, tattered fronds, we leave them under the banana trees and they act as mulch, holding in whatever moisture may be in the soil.
Every summer we get several beautiful clumps of small bananas from these trees. We have learned that even if they are harvested early, they ripen beautifully. The flavor is so much better than that of the larger bananas in the stores. They are sweet, with hints of the tastes of other fruits, such as strawberries. Each stalk can be cut into smaller “hands,” which are similar to the way bananas are sold in the store. But a hand of smaller bananas usually has around 8 to 10 bananas on it.
