Where and how to grow bananas

Rare buyer of exotic and strange fruits think about where they're imported, how and what to grow, how they are collected. More rarely, the question arises as to which path air? sea? land?) they overcame before reaching the hands of consumers. So, the vast majority of overseas fans of fruits sure know where and how to grow bananas in Africa on the palms. And... will not be right.

Birthplace of bananas

Indeed, many believe that the birthplace of bananas is Africa. This is incorrect. In fact, on the African continent bananas came from Southeast Asia, mainly from tropical and sub-tropical regions of India and China. In these countries bananas are long revered as a sacred fruit, the restoring force and feeds the mind. The roof of some ancient Indian pagodas, preserved from those times, have the shape of a banana, that's how I had respect for this fruit.

Next, the banana culture from India and China has spread to Asia Minor. And from there was transported to Africa by Arab merchants, for which waters of the Indian ocean in the middle ages represented the same "inland sea", which at the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans were Mediterranean. These same merchants brought the banana to Palestine, and Arabia.

I should say that by the time when Portuguese sailors appeared on the West coast of Africa (this was at the beginning of the XV century), bananas have "bypassed" the whole continent from West to East. The Portuguese first tried them in Guinea. Strange fruit were a good choice. They made the first importation of bananas from Africa to the Canary Islands, and then began to plant them in their colonies in Central and South America.

That's how interesting it turned out: the countries of Central and South America banana plantations the most recent in the world, and turned in their cultivation and the sale successful. Panama, Colombia, Ecuador banana supply today the whole of Europe. As for Russia: if before people ate exclusively Cuban bananas, now on a par with the Europeans, buys mainly fruits from Ecuador.

How to grow bananas

Bananas grow on a palm tree. Answer all the polls. Well, almost everything. In fact, according to encyclopedic information, the banana is "a genus of perennial herbaceous plants". Or: "kind of tree-high plants from the banana family, with huge leaves and large flowers zygomorphic, collected by ear". So bananas grow on grass.

Yes, a resident of Central Russia, accustomed in the grass to collect the strawberries or, say, blueberries, bent three of perdition, hardly can imagine a bunch of bananas weighing poltsentnera growing on herbaceous plant height from 5 to 9 meters. However, it is in the nature, there can reach a height of even 12 metres and more, bananas also derived selectors and cultivated today, do not exceed one or two meters. But it will impress...

Moreover, the diameter of one such "grass" is 10 or even more centimeters. On its top flaunts a spreading panicle oblong leaves (they are accepted by Europeans for palm branches). From leafy rosettes hangs a kind of trunk about four feet in length. This is the inflorescence, which forms an ovary from 250-300 tiny Baranchikov. What Europeans is reminiscent of the trunk should be called a bunch, and what is on the market and store shelves, not really bunches, and brush from five to eight fused fruit. Real banana bunch – a set of brushes, very closely adjacent to each other.