Our Banana Tree

We have a banana tree (actually five of them) in our backyard. They were planted about a year and a half ago by one of our previous gardeners....the owner pays for the gardener, not us. He planted two trees, one larger one and one smaller one. Since that time the larger one has sprouted one new banana tree out of it's base, and the smaller one has two growing out of it (the last picture is of the smaller one, and you can see one of it's babies to the right side of the picture and if you click on the picture to make it bigger you can see the other tinier one on the left side of the trunk.) Anyway, the gardener told us it took a couple of years to actually get bananas to grow, so we were never expecting any, but last Monday all the kids came screaming in from the backyard to tell us that the banana tree had grown a banana flower and you could see the tiny bananas starting to grow. After I realized that no one was bleeding or dead (they were really screaming, all of them, and it was hard to know what exactly was going on) I ran out with them to see the banana flower. It was awesome! Here are some pictures.

The first three pictures were taken on March 28th, and the second three were taken on April 4th. It is amazing to me that they are growing so rapidly! Monday we had to peek under the flower petal to see the bananas and five days later there are three sets of huge bananas and more coming!