Harvesting a $176 Bunch of Bananas
Sunday, February 20, 2011 at 09:07PM 
It’s quite a good feeling harvesting a bunch of bananas worth $176 from your own garden! With recent storms and floods in Queensland damaging banana plantations, the price of bananas in Oz is creeping up, and is already at $6 a kilo in our local supermarkets. Organic bananas are always a little more pricey, and a local on-line retailer is now selling them for $8.50 a kilo.
In our recent banana harvest, we reaped 148 beautiful organic Cavendish bananas. They’re a pretty good size, just a little smaller than those you find at the shops (what do they do to make those monstrous bananas??). The total weight of this banana bunch came in at 20.72 kilos. At the price of organic bananas ($8.50), our haul is worth $176.12. You can pick up Cavendish banana plants at local nurserys at the moment for $18, making them quite a worthwhile investment! In our subtropical climate, bananas will fruit after two years, while in the true topics, they’ll fruit in a little as nine months.
So what does one do with 148 bananas? Well they do ripen somewhat progressively, and we freeze the excess ripe ones by peeling the skin off, cutting them in half and stacking them in containers.
For more info on growing bananas see our previous post.
Reader Comments (13)
hey there, that's one thing i've been thinking of, why does everyone have to pay more when the cyclones hit, if you can grow in your backyard, also, why do banana farmers continue to grow bananas en masse with no other support trees? well it may not help in a huge cyclone, but some protection is better than none? Anyway, time to give bananas a go here in the northern beaches. Cheers!
They grow huge bananas by removing most of the baby bananas from each plant & only letting a few of them mature. (source: my uncle used to be a banana farmer in Northern NSW, he said the practice started in Qld & NSW farmers had to adopt it eventually as they were losing sales, people had come to expect bananas to be large & wouldn't buy the smaller ones that were grown with less waste)
Definately recommend giving them a grow Wazz. They are such an easy fruit tree to grow.
We must admit we remove the baby bananas from our bunches too. The whole bunch just gets too long and heavy otherwise. Even still, it seems in recent years that supermarket bananas have got even bigger...and more tasteless.
Awesome haul!
awesome!!! nice work!
I'd love to grow banana's here... must add to my list. Can I ask why take the skins off when you freeze banana? We did it with the skins on and they went ok in muffins..?
I'm going to take this photo out and show it to the banana trees as motivation. They are one year old now.
When are you guys running another open-garden? I want to bring my hubby along and demonstrate where our garden is going - bit of propaganda to help him imagine the end result of all the work in the first couple of years of a new permie garden.
We use our frozen peeled bananas in smoothies. We have also found that you can make a damn good smoothy this way without any milk: just frozen banana and little fruit juice (e.g. mango).
They look lovely.
Do you have to bag them? Whenever I have seen bananas being grown in peoples yards they have always been bagged, but I never knew why?!
Yum, I'm so jealous! I finished off my banana circle on the weekend, and got my little plants all mulched. Hopefully I'll be showing off my own bananas in about a year!
Hey Kristy ... do you mean you eat the bananas with the skin on? We once froze one with skin on and couldnt get it off.
Leisel .. . we will be running a garden tour next month. Send us an email if you'd like to join in :)
We bag our banana Cherie. Apparently, it helps with the development and ripening of the bananas. I guess it also deters the birds and bats which may be a problem.
Nice work Darren. It took about 2 years here before our first bunch was harvested. Id be interested to know if you get a bunch before then :)
I always freeze my bananas with the skin on. It is the perfect packaging and they will not suffer from freezer burn. The only time I have troubles getting the skin of after it has come out from the freezer is when I have not let it thaw for long enough. Putting them in water or on a metal surface will speed up the process. :)
Hey there happyearth.I picked up some cool bananas today to plant out near the laundry to catch the washing machine water. Got them from bunnings from this mob: http://www.humphris.com.au/html/coolbanana/coolbananasoverview.html
Very cool! Thanks for the inspiration.
Great work guys. My first bunch is just about ready to harvest howver i have lost a few due to bugs. I didn't bag them either. Next time I will.