I haven’t blogged about my most recent gardening adventures. Although I had a really extensive herb garden this past year, it was all crammed into one small area because most of our yard was in the throes of various renovation projects. I tried to document it by periodically leaning out an upstairs window and taking an overhead shot to annotate for future reference. I neglected the rest of the yard. Most of it was getting trampled or excavated, anyway. Plus, my gardening activities aren’t pretty or graceful, so I wasn’t terribly gung-ho about gardening while the place was full of contractors.

Despite my neglect, our mini-banana plantation flourished.

A few years ago, I planted a banana plant. I bought it at Home Depot on a whim and expected it to die at the end of the season like all tender annual herbs do. (Yes, bananas are herbs). I’m far too lazy to dig something like this out of the ground and harbor it in the house, so until I get a greenhouse, that’s just the way things are here.

I certainly never expected it to survive, let alone multiply. But multiply, it did.

The second year, there were three. The next, five. This year there were seven, plus lots of babies that friends dug up and carted away throughout the summer.

Through the magic of micro-climates, the banana plants didn’t die back until a frost got them in late November. Usually we then pull off all the dead leaves and hack the plants back so they’re less ugly. This year by the time they died it had gotten bitterly cold and we haven’t had a reprieve. I just haven’t had a chance to clean up the mess, so this is what they look like today:

A few weeks ago, we were hanging some Christmas lights outside and I was being a fussy perfectionist so Husband wandered into the backyard to get away from me. He returned with this:

We had no idea one of the plants had flowered and fruited! It’s blackened because of the frost and it’s frozen like a popsicle. Still, it made me happy. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next year. Maybe I’ll have the dead leaves cleaned up by then…