Yum, fresh bananas

When my daughter and I got back to Hilo on Sunday night, it was dark, but Monday morning we looked out the kitchen window and noticed that at least some of the bananas were ripe.  We were busy with other errands yesterday, but this morning we went out back with a machete.

The "dwarf" gene in our dwarf apple banana plants doesn't seem to be holding up very well - these bananas were too high for me to reach.  So I used the machete to chop and saw a big notch in the plant's stem, until it slowly toppled over.  Then I chopped off the overripe, rotten, damaged or otherwise undesirable ones, cut the ripe or not-yet-ripe ones off and put them in a bucket to bring inside and wash.

After getting rid of the ones we definitely didn't want, we were left with... 4 dozen bananas!  About a half-dozen of those were already ripe; the rest were green and will ripen over the coming days.  So I don't expect to have to shop for bananas for a while.