The Plantain at Home
I've been looking to align my blog content to the title. Though originally, Lowtree is the name of my indie record label, I wasn't doing much recording at the time of creating this blog, so I wrote all shades of thoughts. Now, I feel that with a name as Lowtree one would expect at least contents on trees of some sort. That's what we are going to be doing hence.
In these days of concern for changing weather and climate, I have a liking for shade trees around the house. Might be residence, workplace or commercial houses.
I haven't had much chance to a research on this concept, but since this blog has been unattended to for long, let me share this experience I have with you in the meantime. You might find it useful or at least informative.
Here we go:
About a year ago, I bought five shockers of plantain from a neighbor and I planted them; squeezing them into a few open spots in the front of the house.They have all fruited and been harvested, yielding appreciable bunches of plantain!
In the course of their life I saw them act as windbreaks during some of the occasional strong wind that blew, often damaging exposed property.
The plantain is a plant of burden, if you permit me say. It seems it transfers all its succulence and life into its fruits, and usually dies with the harvesting of that fruit bunch. Nothing to worry about though, as it multiplies itself profusely while maturing, so that it leaves you with many shockers to watch grow and harvest in their season.
It does not take any work aside from the occasional weeding around the base to keep it neat and to remove unwanted competition for its nutrition. You also need to trim off yellowing and dried leaves, which for me, is a way to ensure unwanted animals do not go inhabiting there.
One more thing you might do is to wedge an artificial support to the stem of the plantain tree to keep it from breaking and causing you to harvest prematurely, sometimes. Why this? Well, remember I said earlier that the plantain seems to transfer its body juice into its fruits. As it does this, the fruits begin to form and mature and get heavier; much, much heavier for the now lean stem to support. The weight of the bunch pulls the tree down towards it and, without a wedged support, any slight wind could cause the stem to snap and you'd have to harvest your bunch at that level, whether fully matured or not.
Please, drop a comment if you find this useful in any way. Also, feel free to add anything more you may know to upgrade this content.
