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Old 06-14-2009, 08:24 PM   #32 (permalink)
Simply Bananas
Formerly known as porkpi
 
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Location: James Island SC
Zone: 8b-9a
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Default Re: We all have a story about how we got started, I'd love to hear yours!

Here is my novella. Its a long winded and rambling yarn:

I live in Charleston which sits on a peninsula nestled between the Ashley and the Cooper rivers on two sides and Charleston Harbor on the third. The water seems to be able to moderate the temperatures some from the standard USDA zone map.

Being a relatively old city, the genteel residents have adorned their houses with ornate gardens and unusual plants from the days back when the city was settled. One of the plants that seemed to do well was the Banana.

Downtown Charleston has many secret fenced gardens and protected courtyards. The protection has allowed banana plants to do extremely well, often overwintering with very few leaves lost. When one has successful plants they are given away to friends and neighbors and this has happened for decades in Charleston. Needless to say, a stroll down any of the historical residential streets will have usually yield a few bananas plant sightings. As a biology major in college here in the early 80's, seeing large healthy banana plants fascinated me. I often caught Carolina anoles( a type of iguanid lizard able to change colors from brown to green and back again) around the banana plants to feed snakes in our labs(and my apartment).

While I excelled in field biology in college, I opted not to go to graduate school but found work on a flora and fauna rich barrier island known as Kiawah as a naturalist(not a naturist). I was eventually hired to protect a big time Hollywood movie crew from snakes as they shot scenes in serpent dense areas. One thing led to another and I jettisoned my paid naturalist career and was sucked into the better paying entertainment business for films television and commercials.

My jobs took me to tropical lands where my fascination with banana plants increased seeing them in Costa Rica, Mexico, New Orleans, Bahamas, and the Virgin Islands. In the meantime, I bought a house across the river from Charleston in 1992 on James Island. Low and behold there were two struggling banana plants on the shady west side of my new house. I moved them to the east side there they stayed.


I got married and my wife was interested in clumping bamboo for landscaping. I was put in charge of researching it. Somehow, my searches always led me to bananas plants. I saw how people in more colder areas than ours grew bananas and even had luck with fruit, something I never saw while looking at the hundreds of mats in Charleston.

One November, my wife and I ended up in Miami at Fairchild Tropical Botanical Gardens at the annual Ramble where they fund raise through a plant dispersal, antique sale and arts and craft show. My wife was an invited artist to the show, so I had the better part of 3 days to wander the grounds. In between fetching snacks from Tropical Chinese or deep fried garlicky artichoke hearts, I met Don from Going Bananas and got to see the different types of plants and fruits they had brought to sell.

The following May, I bought some Ele Ele, Basjoo, Ice Cream, Itinerans sp yunann(?) from eBay. I watered and fed them and my original mat of what turned out to be Orinocos. They went from this:

to this:

in one season. The following April, an Orinoco bloomed.

Banana plants were very entertaining and I decided that others might like this entertainment as well. I formed a small company called Simply Bananas to provide locals with an alternate to the either non fruiting types or non cold hardy types sold in local nurseries, or big box home improvement stores. I mostly sell the plants at the Charleston Farmer’s Market every Saturday from April until Labor day.

The Charleston Farmer’s Market was rated 5th best in the country by Travel and Leisure Magazine last year and we have a average attendance of about 3,000 people every Saturday. I’m lucky in that my booth is next to my wife’s so now we get to spend Saturday’s together. Occasionally I’ll place an ad on the Charleston Craigs list if my inventory swells. I don’t do mail order as my current job on the tv show “Army Wives” eats up my daytime hours that once used to be for fishing and postal errands.

I'm in my 4th year with Simply Bananas. While it won't pay all the bills, it does provide a nice vacation to Costa Rica every year as well as a justified tax write-off of a great hobby.




The Simply Bananas Banana Plantation August 2008


FIN.
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