A-Z challenge B = BANANAS

DAY TWO OF THE A-Z CHALLENGE 2015

To people of my age (blushes girlishly and declines to reveal exact figure) BB = Brigitte Bardot, but since I joined a writers' forum those letters represent another A-Z Challenger. Check out her blog about Rome.  http://atozofrome.blogspot.co.uk/

BB and I share a passion for bananas, though the reason why is lost in the mists of time.
The following photographs represent the life-cycle of a banana from flower to fruit.

This is only a small tree in our community garden but the flower was half a metre long.

Here the petals are curling back to reveal the individual hands of infant bananas.

Almost ready to ripen in the sun.

Inside a banana plantation - the plastic bags are to protect the bunches when they are cut and loaded onto lorries. Each bunch is almost more than a strong man can carry. The plants are chopped down and recycled to mulch next year's plants which are already growing alongside the parent plants.

And this is an external view - the covers are to keep humidity in and prevent sunburned plants! So next time you fly into Tenerife, you will know what those acres of beige are all about.

In our local market we buy Grade 2 fruit - the ones deemed not good enough for export. They taste fine to us - and occasionally we get more than we bargained for - Triplets!

SHOW AND TELL SUNDAY

poinsettia

First things first - apologies for absence. I have been busy lately rewriting a novel - I'll tell you about that another time - and my blogs have been infrequent, to say the least. So I have decided to kick-start it again with a "Show and Tell Sunday", and if I have any followers and visitors left, please leave a comment to encourage me to continue!


Christmas is coming in Tenerife as well as the rest of the world, and one of our first signs is the poinsettias coming back to full colour in the gardens. We also have Los Reyes - The Kings - waiting on the roundabout to be lit up at night.


For those of you who have been following the avalanche story - here is this morning's set of photographs.
When the workmen told me it would take twenty days, they should have added 'probablemente' - this is manana country, after all!


People have been blaming the rock-fall on the heavy rain we had two days earlier - our first in over a year - but I think it is more likely to be due to the banana plantation perched on top. This is a closeup of the cliff through which they cut the access road when building the autopista 25 or so years ago -  Huge rocks, so heavy that I cannot lift a head-sized one - interspersed with gravel layers riddled with holes in which the local pigeons nest.

Twenty-five years of steadily-seeping water - we are lucky there wasn't a school built at the base of the cliff.

Steady as a rock? I will never use that phrase again without visualising this - and  yes, that side road really IS that steep!