Monday, October 29, 2012

Fruit Blog Entry #1


Questions to address:

1. Tell us what your favorite fruit is – and:
2. Where is it grown?  In the US? World?
3. What kind of fruit is it?  (Botanical description)
4. Attach a picture, from the supermarket (if it is being sold right now).

My favorite fruits are bananas. Bananas need a constant temperature, and also humidity levels. Both are found in tropical regions, as opposed to the cooler climates of North America and Central Europe.

The only states in the US to grow bananas are Hawaii and Florida, however the crops tend to be small, leaving the US dependent on imported bananas.

Botanical description
Bananas are large, herbaceous monocots, reaching twenty feet in some cultivars, but generally six to fifteen feet tall in cultivation. The "trunk" or pseudostem is not a true stem, but only the clustered, cylindrical aggregation of leaf stalk bases. Leaves are among the largest of all plants, becoming up to nine feet long and two feet wide. Margins are entire and venation is pinnate. Leaves tear along the veins in windy conditions, giving a feathered or tattered look. There are five to fifteen leaves on each plant, with ten considered the minimum for properly maturing a bunch of fruit. The perennial portion of the plant is the rhizome, which may weigh several pounds. It is often called a corm. It produces suckers, or vegetative shoots, which are thinned to two per plant - one "parent" sucker for fruiting and one "follower" to take the place of the parent after it fruits and dies back. It also produces roots and serves as a storage organ for the plant.



                                                     Picture of bananas in supermarket

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