Bananaculture 101

The forecast says a low of 26º tonight, so I am hauling in my remaining banana trees from my little grotto. They will winter over in various parts of our house. In past years, I have hauled in 10-15' trees, which is pretty fun the first few months of "tropical winter wonderland", but by March, the trees start looking really sad.

This summer the College Boy mentioned that I could probably take a machete to the banana trees and then they would grow pretty, new leaves by next spring. (Not to mention how much these 3-year old banana trees weigh now; I carried one in today, post-machete, and it was 2'6" tall, 30" in circumference, and STILL weighed 47 lbs.)

To show you how quickly these trees grow, I have taken some shots immediately after hacking their tops off, and one, two, and three hours post-hack. It's very interesting:

Minutes before the Autumnal Hauling-In began:

Notice the honeycomb-like circles that make up a banana tree. These are spongy, and filled with water.

One hour after I topped this banana tree:

I took this photo two hours after I topped this tree off:

And this banana tree had been topped off three hours before I took this photo.

It already has 2 different levels of leaves growing! Fascinating...

I brought these banana trees in 6 days ago.
These trees have already begun opening up their leaves, which were so tightly-wrapped and hardly formed when they were topped off last week:

Class dismissed.