JoeReal

Went to Mike's house in Antioch yesterday. He dug up the 4-ft California gold pup for me, a process that took about a couple of minutes only. Promptly load it to the van, then drove off to plant the Gold in my friend's yard, some 40 miles away.

Before we got to the digging part, he gave us a tour of his yard, and here are the highlights. He has fabulous fantastic bananas already proven to be productive in his yard. He also have other tropicals and subtropicals like avocado trees. He has fantastic looking palms, and blueberries in between the trees or palms.

For those of you wanting to harvest sizeable amount of fruits, Mike is doing the right thing. Maintaining only one or two pups per main banana corm. Selling off or giving away pups that would otherwise crowd the area. If you let your bananas be themselves when it comes to pupping a lot, you will have less frequency of blooming and smaller bunches of fruits in our zone.

All of Mike's banana plants are dark green and super healthy. He has praying hands currently fruiting. Most of all, I got to see the fantastic California Gold fruits. The mother plant has very few half-sized leaves, which were damaged earlier in the season and a total of about 5 only if I counted properly from memory. But the trunk is quite big. With that size and condition of the tree, I can't believe it put out such a big bunch of fruit, the biggest one I ever saw in our area. Remember that this is Northern California, and before Mike's CaGold, the biggest fruiting banana bunch that I saw around our area is only 1/4 the size of Mike's California Gold. California Gold has a more rounder shaped fruit compared to Orinoco when the fruits are bigger, but when the fruits are smaller, they looked the same.

With the big bunch of banana fruit, Mike told me that he will be having a problem on what to do with such a big bunch. I hope to post some recipes for him before end of October or before the first frost, about the time we start harvesting these fruits. These plantain type fruit are better suited for cooking rather than for ripening and eating fresh.

Here's my initial tip for Mike and those that are going to harvest Orinocos as well: Use the fruit just how you would use the commercially sold plantain banana in the supermarket. When these are semi-ripe, you can simply microwave them for 4-6 minutes per fruit depending on size, and then peel off and spread sour cream and eat it like you would a potato prepared the same way, although I like the taste and complexity of carbohydrates of plantain banana than potatoes, and plantain bananas have higher fiber and more complex carbs. You can make tostones for sure. And we have other nice recipes for cooking and preparing the plantain types just like you would mashed potatoes. There are endless uses for these types of plantain bananas, and if you check the price at the supermarket, the plantain type bananas costs twice as much as the dessert cavendish types like dole and chiquita. I will post our various recipes for cooking such plantain types of fruits sometime later.