Adventures in Landscaping

A few weeks ago, I was walking out to the garage and one of our landscape plants had sprung the creepiest looking thing ever. It was an enormous growth about a foot and a half long with a big, red curled tongue. Steve said it looked like the pods from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

I'm from the East Coast, so much of the native desert plants look like weeds to me. This plant had always looked like a ten foot high weed which was bad enough. Now it had some creepy pod with a tongue sprouting out of it. It had to go!

I went back the a week later and things were sprouting out of the giant pod. Things that looked like baby fingers. It's time for google, because I'm getting pretty sure there's something evil in the back yard.

Do I kill it with Holy Water or do I kill it with fire?




After some searching, it's not sprouting evil. It's growing bananas. (Identified to beyummy edible bananas by the helpful folks at bananas.org.) Nice! We like bananas.

Then I started counting and looking at ripe banana bunches - only a few of which you can see in this photo. Right now, I've got about 75 bananas and every leaf of that red thing is going to roll back and reveal more bananas. All of which will be ripe at the same time. If Steve and I both eat a banana a day...that's not enough.  We'll up our consumption to 2 bananas a day. And I'll make banana bread. And smoothies. And give some to the neighbors. And friends. And strangers.

It's a lot of bananas, but homegrown fruit is awesome.  Then I spotted this...another red pod that will be absolutely full of bananas.

I'm going to be the Bubba Gump of bananas.