I continue to be astonished at the quantity of fruit we can produce on our little suburban block. The fruit bowl is nearly always full. Ok, I’m cheating a little. Most of the tamarillos came from our verge garden, which I guess is strictly speaking not on our little suburban block. We planted them as a food forest pioneer/nursery tree, and they’ve served that purpose brilliantly, creating a total canopy cover over the area that has eliminated weeding altogether. The fruit is a side benefit, but it’s a prolific one.
We harvested over 20kg of tamarillos today, and this is the third pick of the season, with another to go. It’s heading up towards 60 to 70kg, from interplant nursery trees in an 11 metre stretch of verge. There’s a huge bunch of Cavendish bananas ripening on the back deck, and a smaller bunch of Ladyfingers. There’s three more bunches of Ladyfingers along the south side of the house and two of Cavs in the back yard. The lemon tree in the verge planting has its first real crop just starting to ripen, and there’s a nice crop of oranges still very green but to look forward to. The guava tree is loaded and we’re still getting a couple of passionfruit a week. And most of the permanent trees are still to start bearing.
I wrote a post in summer speculating about the reasons. The only thing I’d add to that list is using local knowledge to select trees that love the climate, and the soil. Coffs is famous for the Big Banana for a reason, and the large refugee and migrant population have brought in knowledge of different varieties suited to cooking as well as eating as fruit. Last night at a party we ate bananas cooked with little dried fish, and when I remarked that I’d love to learn how to make it, our host said “every African knows how to cook this!”
So, this week I’ll make some guava jelly and we’ll eat passionfruit with our yoghurt every morning. My African neighbour will exchange a big bowl of green bananas for a lesson in cooking with them. I’ll make another batch of tamarillo sauce and I’m putting some out on the footpath giveaway chair every day. I’m going to be making banana bread for lunchboxes and banana icecream for after-school snacks and probably some dried banana too, giving lots away and I’ll still be lucky to get through them all before the next bunch needs to be cut. Suburban bounty.
I’d love the recipe for green banana cooking if you can share it some time please. We give away banana hands and eat them and freeze them, but there’s just only so many things you can do with them.
I will Judy. My African neighbour makes a stew with them, using dried little fish a bit like dried whitebait called dagaa. I’m still experimenting with substitutes that might be easily available. Basically though, with green banana that is fully mature but still green, you can peel, chop into pieces and use in stews and curries as you would potato. The cooking bananas are better – they seem to have more surface starch that makes the stew thick and delicious – but ordinary Cavs work.
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