Upon moving into our permanent apartment a few weeks ago, we made a fun discovery: two banana trees in our backyard.
These trees have become our new children and now we’re reading all about how to care for the trees, when to harvest the bananas, what sorts of fertilizer to use on them…and we waters them often. He shall henceforth be known as Donkey Kong.
Senegal is basically the perfect banana-growing climate, with high humidity, daytime temperatures in the 80s and slightly cooler nighttime temperatures. We’re hoping we’ll have bushels of bananas ready for our consumption in a few weeks.
I’m already planning to make banana bread and banana fro-yo with our little harvest (in addition to consuming belly-aching amounts of raw banana, of course). Got any banana recipes you want to share? Send them along.
Rachael Cullins is a twentysomething American girl living in Dakar, Senegal, with her husband and two dogs. She blogs about her adventures in Senegal and travels elsewhere in West Africa. She will reside in Dakar until summer 2013, when she and her family will move to another foreign post as part of her husband’s career with the U.S. government. In addition to West Africa, she has traveled to France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Italy and Costa Rica and plans to continually add to that list.
