Bananas: what are they?

Bananas

  

A banana is an elongated, slightly curved fruit, which comes from the banana plant. In Suriname people speak of bacove when it comes to the fruit that can be eaten directly from the skin and they speak of bananas when it comes to green plantains.

Bananas need a lot of sun to grow. That’s why they grow in the countries around the equator. Countries like Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru...

The banana plant

The banana plant is the largest herbaceous plant in the world.

Although the banana plant gets pretty high, it is not a real tree because it has no wooden trunk. What looks like the trunk of the banana plant are actually the large petioles.

These partially overlap and they form a load-bearing structure, an apparent strain. At the

end of these petioles is a large oblong leaf disc with a clear midrib.

These leaves are in a spiral.

The size of the plant varies greatly depending on the specific banana variety: The most grown group variety 'Cavendish' can grow to more than three meters high and the kind of 'Musa Ingens' can grow to twelve meters high!

A flower bud grows on the apparent strain. This button consists of hundreds of flowers and each flower becomes a banana. Bananas grow in bunches of about 50 kilos.

The stalk of the banana plant is very short and is completely underground. The strain forms

a large mass of fine long roots that remain very close to the bottom surface.

It takes about 9 months for a banana to mature and be harvested.

The banana stalk only produces a bunch of bananas once. For the following bunches, the mother strain is cut off after a new shoot has been formed, which in turn is the the next bunch. Branch shoots are formed from the underground strain, these are taken and they grow new plants. The bananas that are grown for consumption do not contain seeds, as opposed to the wild species where the fruits are full of hard angular seeds.

Cultivation

The bananas we find in our store, come from large plantations and are mostly monocultures. Nevertheless, a lot of bananas are grown in agro forestry systems in the tropics. Farmers in the tropics have some banana plants on their fields or in their garden. These bananas are mainly for personal use and for the local market.