Yesterday, Roger and I decided to wade up the creek in the valley behind my parent’s house. The creek is healthier than I have seen it in decades; full of wildlife, including fish, frogs, tadpoles (big fat ones!), crayfish and the occasional turtle.

“Hey, Dad, there is a turtle over there!”, Roger exclaimed. I looked and I didn’t see a damned thing. At first. When Roger makes such an observation, I know better than the doubt him.

Now, you might look at the picture at the right and think, “well, duh, it is obvious”. That picture is the product of modern technology! The reality was that said turtle was under some tree roots (seen at the top of the picture) in a deep shadow near the bank of the river. Not terribly obvious.

Moving a bit closer, fortunately not too close, the turtle became quite obvious. It was a snapper and a pretty good sized one, too!

Roger and I had talked about snapping turtles earlier in the week and I said that I knew how to pick one up. Of course, that meant that I was going to have to pick this particularly ornery beast up.

Can’t disappoint the son on Father’s day, after all!

Snapping turtles are one of the angriest of critters around. These are some seriously bad tempered critters. And they are well armed.

When something said turtle doesn’t like (or wants to eat) passes within about 6″ of its face, it’ll sit motionless until the target is within range. Then the turtle will shoot its rather rock-like head out with jaws wide open and then snap them shut. Flesh and bone is no match. Neither are shovel handles, if the snapper is big enough (this one wasn’t).

Given that they can also move side-to-side fairly fast and those are some really big/sharp claws on its feet, the safest way to pick up one of these is by the tail.

So, tail grab it was!

In the photo at left, I’m actually holding the turtle by the tail with my left hand and shooting the photo with my right. It is a little over a yard long from tail to snout.

Little did I know that snappers can flex their tails enough to swing a bit to get a bit of extra range for their head-thrust-and-snap attack. That was an exciting discovery.

I really need to teach Roger how to use my camera. It would have been easier.

One thing that is not conveyed in this image is just how bad the damned thing smells. Think stirred up sewage lagoon in the hot sun.

After checking out the turtle for a moment, I put it back in the creek.

Little did I know that my turtle adventure was not actually over!

It seems that when you irritate a snapper, they take it quite personally. Not only did the snapper keep one eye on me and one eye on Roger, it actually started to come after us!

Now, fortunately, they aren’t the fastest creatures in the world, but it is still a bit unnerving to have a 25 pound hissing, snapping, rock crawling through the creek after you.

Once it was clear we were moving on, it went back to lurking in the shadows, doing its best to look like a rock.

Of the handful of lenses that I had, none could reach further than 100mm. In the past year, I was kindly loaned a Canon EF 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L, but simply could not justify dropping close to the $2000+ it would require to add such a beast to my kit.

Frankly, I’m cheap. I don’t make a living — don’t make any money to speak of — doing photography and can’t justify dropping huge wads of cash on my photo kit.

Fortunately, Canon caters to the cheap /frugal /broke /hobbyist prosumer crowd and my recent upgrade to the Canon Digital Rebel T1i also gained a significant boost in low light / high ISO performance vs. the Rebel XT.

Enter the Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4.0-5.6 IS Telephoto Zoom Lens. This is a relatively new ~$250 lens that features image stabilization and can only be used on compact sensor bearing Canon cameras. Because it targets smaller than full frame sensors, the lens contains less glass and is of a cheaper build.

With a compact sensor, the lens is subject to the 1.6x multiplier and, thus, performs like a 88-400mm lens on a full frame sensor. Sort of (the full story on performance between EF and EF-S sensors is considerably more complex).

Canon EF-S 50-250mm — 250mm 1/250 f/5.6 — ISO 250

In the short time I have owned the lens, I have captured photos that would not have been possible with my other lenses or would have required more patience than is compatible with “fun photography”.

At left is of a Great Blue Heron. These are some seriously skittish birds and this was taken from 200 feet away.

When photographing moving wildlife, the key is to dial in a shutter speed that can capture the animal. Having a camera with decent high ISO performance compensates greatly for the relative slowness of this lens, obviously.

Canon EF-S 50-250mm — 250mm 1/250 f/5.6 — ISO 1600(!)

For $250, the lens is not the sharpest, fastest, or highest build quality.

Yet, it has not failed to surprise me. The image at right was taken from about 30 feet away from the plants. I was sitting on my parent’s porch enjoying the day and simply turned and took a shot.

The surprise?

If you look closely, there are three flies in that image. Two are these gorgeous little iridescent green flies that have been caught in mid-flight.

And if you look at this picture taken under identical conditions, there is a thread of spider web visible between two petals of the flower.

Canon EF-S 50-250mm — 187mm 1/200 f/5.6

The lens offers a wide enough angle and is light enough that I can feel pretty comfortable walking around with the lens on the camera without worrying about missing too many shots.

Yet, when something is happening off in the distance — like Roger messing with a fish trap and wondering if anyone is watching him — I can easily zoom in and capture the shot without having to disruptively “call for a pose”.

Or being able to sit on the deck, enjoy a beer, and snap a few shots of birds at the bird feeder.

Or grab a frame and then play a game of one of these flowers is not like the other ones.

Ultimately, though, it is about capturing memories with ease and maintaining the “fun” throughout.

At left, is tight crop of a Black Widow that I found this morning.

If you look closely, you can see my reflection on its back (below the mouth bits — it is upside down).

The ring like reflection is the ring flash on my the Canon 100mm macro lens used to take the picture. The bluish-white blob to the right of that is me; my shirt, mostly.

Same shot. Not so cropped.

This particular Black Widow is living in the neighbor’s bed of clover. She is clearly quite hungry in that Black Widow’s are rarely so aggressive. This one would pop out of her hidey-hole at the slightest bit of motion on the web.

I got this particular shot by using a stick to jiggle the web like an insect would.

Beautiful creature, really. Just wish it didn’t live quite so close to where the neighborhood kids play. Thus, it’ll likely be dead by sundown.

A went back and visited Ms. Widow a bit later and discovered that I could get her to come out in the open by jiggling her web with my finger. Slightly unnerving as she approached my finger, but then she decided to hang out in the open.

Thus, I was able to capture the image at left. It is an uncropped, full 15 megapixel, image of the black widow as she hung upside down in her web.

Best viewed at full size and then scaled to fit your monitor.

She then proceeded to hang out and fix her web. Thus, I ended up with a gallery of action shots, spinnerets and all. I didn’t know that black widows have hairy backs.

At left is one of my favorite styles of sandwich (in the strict “once slice of bread w/stuff on it” definition of sandwich…), the open faced sandwich with cheese as the top structural element in lieu of bread.

This particular melt was built on top of a slice of home made bread with heirloom tomato slices, dungeness crab, and cabernet finished goat cheddar cheese. It was seasoned with black pepper, mayo, italian seasoning, and a touch of fresh squeezed lemon juice.

Done right, it can be picked up and eaten like a regular sandwich.

The key to doing it right is in the construction. Yes, I take my sandwich making very seriously.

Detailed construction techniques after the fold.

For any open faced melt, you have to start with a foundation that is strong enough to support the entire contents without being pinched from above. As with many of life’s culinary delicacy’s it was the middle to lower class — the poor folks — who discovered the preparation in an ongoing effort to make low quality foods or relatively scarce ingredients into something not only palatable, but delicious.

The open faced sandwich was originated as a means of serving food without the use of a plate. Traditionally, the food was piled on really stale/hard bread — a trencher — and, once the food was eaten, the trencher was fed to the dogs, the poor, or the diner himself ate it.

For my foundation, I used a slice of home made bread that has been out long enough that it is fairly crisp on the edges and still semi-moist in the middle. If all you have is soft bread, toast it lightly until it is structurally sound, but not so long that it starts to brown significantly. You want a little bit of give.

On the bread, smear a bit of mayonnaise and add some italian seasoning. This puts the mayo and seasoning away from the direct heat used later. Mayo tends to get off flavors when heated too much and italian seasoning just burns.

Next? A layer of vegetables.

For this particular melt, I used medium thickness slices of fresh heirloom tomatoes. Another delicious alternative is cucumbers or, even, lettuce. If using turkey or ham instead of crab, thin slices of green apple also work really well here.

The oil of the mayo will keep the bread from soaking up too much of the moisture of the vegetable and losing structural integrity. And the layer of food on top will cause the veggie to stay fresh, though it will be heated through.

On top of the vegetable layer is the meat layer. I used the meat from one whole dungeness crab, one of the few leftover from Crabtacular VI.

Pile the meat on as high as you like. Just about any kind of already cooked meat will do. Turkey or ham works quite well, too. Replacing the vegetable with cole slaw with a light dressing (light as in “not much”, not as in “low calorie”) and topping with pulled pork works wonderfully.

In any case, the meat should definitely be mounded a bit. You want the cheese to both melt into the meat and roll down the sides onto the layers below.

If you like black pepper and salt, this is the layer to put it on. It will mix well with and draw out some of the flavors from the meat.

For this project, I used simple black pepper. The crab was already fairly salty both by its nature and from having been boiled in salted water.

The final layer is the structural element on top that holds this all together and makes a top cap of bread unnecessary. It is the glue that binds.

I.e. Cheese.

As long as it is a cheese that will melt and then mostly re-solidfy after cooling a bit, it will work.

I used a locally made cabernet finished goat cheddar. The cheese maker first makes goat’s milk based cheddar cheese, then hangs the wheel of cheese in a barrel full of cabernet wine and lets it sit for a few months. The resulting cheese has a bit of the sharpness of a cheddar, mellowed by the use of goat’s milk instead of cow’s milk, and has veins of purple winy fruitiness.

Pile slices of the cheese on top. Not too thick, but thick enough that, upon melting, it will reach the veggie or bread layer underneath the meat.

For any kind of a melt that uses seafood, I like to squeeze a touch of fresh lemon juice over the top.

Into the broiler with your creation!

This is the trickiest step of the entire process, not because it is hard but because it is so easy to get wrong.

You can use a toaster oven or regular oven. Doesn’t matter as long as it has a broiler setting and enough room that there are at least 1.5″ from the heating element to the top of the cheese.

You’ll want to put the creation on top of a cooking sheet of some type in case some of the cheese drips off the side.

Turn the broiler on medium to high and slide the work product underneath.

Now the tricky part….

Keep a close eye on it.

Typically, a melt will go from underdone to perfect to burnt in less than one minute. Your challenge is to detect when that minute is upon you and remove the sandwich at the right second within.

Specifically, it should be removed once the cheese has melted, started to bubble and there are signs of browning. The amount of brown is up to you, but you want to make sure the cheese doesn’t make that split second transition from brown to black (burnt).

Let it sit for a second and then dig in. If you did it right, you should be able to pick it up by the edges of the bread and it should stick together without risk of breakage.

Even if it isn’t quite that strong, it’ll still be delicious with knife and fork. It just won’t scratch the sandwich itch.

Full credit where credit is due…. this is based on the Ham-Cheesy that my Mom would make for me often when I was growing up. In that form, it was ham and cucumbers, typically. Maybe with tomato.

Of course, most of my cooking inspiration comes from my Mom. She is a fantastic cook and, in hindsight, I realize how lucky I was to sit down to such fabulous meals as a kid.

Out of the blue, I received a tweet from Steven Blackford:

@bbum Wanted to say thanks the old BackSpace Module LizardView. Still using it after all these years on all my NeXT systems.

Wow. That took me back nearly 20 years! From the moment I started writing Objective-C code on a NeXT in 1989, I have taken a break every couple of years to write a screensaver or five. They have always been fairly simple, always geometric in nature, and generally with a bit of fractally goodness.

At left is a screenshot of LizardView. It was one of the first screensavers I wrote for the NeXT. Fortunately, Steven still had the source for LizardView (I likely still do, too, on one of the optical discs in my garage) and it took me about 10 minutes to port it to Mac OS X Leopard.

Blast from the past.

If you’d like to experience this awzzum zele-bra-shun of k0l0rfull moiré patterns, I dropped Lizard.saver.zip on friday.com.

Funny story; in about 1996 or 97, I found myself at a rather random (and not that terribly good) rave like party in St. Louis, MO. There was a video projector that was running some “rave animations” loop. Lizard was used throughout as 5 or so second interstitial between different animation sequences!

Roger found a black widow hiding under the rim of a neighbor’s trash can.

I took a photo before we knocked it down and squished it.

As much as I hate to kill anything, I’m not at all opposed to discouraging growth of the disturbingly large population of black widows in the San Jose area this year.

After 4 years, Canon has released an upgraded camera in the Digital Rebel series that has compelled me to replace my Digital Rebel Xt.

The Digital Rebel T1i, which started shipping in North America this month, is quite an extraordinary camera and a huge upgrade over the Xt. Excellent low light performance (high ISO performance), extreme versatility with the ability to shoot entirely automatic through to fully manual, and lots of usability upgrades.

I won’t be positing a detailed review. That has been covered far more effectively than I ever could by the folks at DPReview.

At above-left is the first image I shot with the T1i. Nothing terribly special, but I couldn’t have taken the same with the Xt without a tripod or switching to the relatively special purpose Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens (but that would have yielded a very narrow depth of field). Since someone asked, I added a link to the Amazon product page, too.

Canon 50mm f/1.4 – 1/125 f/1.6 – ISO 500

While there are many features and refinements of the T1i that I’m looking forward to leveraging, the high-ISO / low light performance is the one that yields an immediate benefit to me.

I like shooting photos in restaurants and the like, but I hate using a flash. Beyond making the food look artificial and destroying whatever natural ambiance the restaurant has tried to achieve, the flash is a huge annoyance to everyone — staff, customers, chefs, etc..

The photo at right is another shot that I could have done with the Xt without the flash or disruptive use of a tripod and posing.

Certainly, I will also leverage the upgrade from an 8MP to 15.1MP sensor, too. While the whole megapixel wars thing was overhyped and appears to now largely be over, there are some serious advantages to having a lot more pixels.

On the interactive front, it means that you can zoom into a photo and see some interesting details that wouldn’t be apparent with a lower resolution image. Looking at the full sized version of Eddie searing scallops reveals the slight haze caused by the scallops scorching under the flame.

But the biggest advantage of lots and lots of pixels is that it stretches the value of your lenses. In particular, I can shoot a shot with the Canon 100mm macro lens, crop nearly half the picture, and still end up with an image that is of the same resolution as a full framed image from the Xt. That would have been very handy for pictures like this, this, and this.

While the camera is brilliant, the software is not. At least, not so much when you want to work with an all RAW workflow.

Whenever a new camera is released, there is a lag between the release of the camera and when Apple or Adobe releases updates that include RAW support for the camera. Thus, I can’t currently shoot in RAW and import directly into Aperture (or Lightroom).

As I had shot a bunch of the initial images in RAW, I decided to install and use Canon’s RAW processing software to convert the images to usable form.

I summarized the experience with this tweet:

Canon’s camera software is a gigantic turd in the box containing an awesome camera.

Canon is in the camera business, not the imaging software business. And it shows in the software they ship with the camera.

First, don’t bother trying to download the software for your camera from canon. You can download firmware updates and you can download updates to the imaging software, but you have to have the original CD-ROM to do an installation.

How silly. What possible business reason does Canon have to prevent me from using my camera with any computer I encounter? This isn’t a revenue issue, the software “comes for free” with the camera (their description, not mine).

Because of this, I now have to install whatever outdated version of the software came with my camera and then grab the update from Canon’s rather poor web site to be able to upgrade to the latest version. For the rebel XT, the supplied installer is old enough and poorly written enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if it fails outright on Leopard these days (assuming I could even find my CD).

Now, with installer in hand, the experience does not improve.

The installer must be run from an administrative user’s account. University student trying to use a computer in a lab to process some photos? Not happening. Sensible user whose primary account is non-administrative? Log out, log in as administrator.

Once successfully run, the installer asks some questions and then does the installation into /Applications. No options to install it somewhere else.

The real kick in the crotch, though, is that the installed software is just a bunch of applications. It appears to be isolated to a folder in /Applications.

Even once installed, there is no guarantee the software is going to work. It certainly didn’t on my MacBook Pro; Canon’s own RAW decoding software can’t decode RAW images on my MBP.

However, the same software dragged to a MacPro works just fine.

Frustrating beyond belief and raises the question of why the hell the inferior installer is required in the first place.

Assuming you have the software installed on a working system, the actual user interface is awful, too. Non standard file browsers and toolbars. Toolbar buttons that make little sense. Icons in the UI that indicate something, but clicking on the icon yields no information.

And it doesn’t fully work, either. On the Mac Pro, the non-standard file browser randomly doesn’t allow some folders or volumes to be expanded. Like, for example, my user’s home folder. Got images in your Pictures folder? Nope. Can’t get to them from the software and there is no “open” or “import” that offers the system’s standard dialog box.

Of course, much of this stupidity might be explained by the obviously buggy implementation; so buggy that the system complains about the software loudly and often:

*** WARNING: Method setAutoresizesAllColumnsToFit: in class NSTableView is deprecated on 10.4 and later. It should not be used in new applications. Use setColumnAutoresizingStyle: instead.
*** WARNING: Method autoresizesAllColumnsToFit in class NSTableView is deprecated on 10.4 and later. It should not be used in new applications. Use columnAutoresizingStyle instead.
*** WARNING: Method setResizable: in class NSTableColumn is deprecated on 10.4 and later. It should not be used in new applications. Use setResizingMask: instead.
*** WARNING: Method isResizable in class NSTableColumn is deprecated on 10.4 and later. It should not be used in new applications. Use resizingMask instead.
*** -[NSLock unlock]: lock (%lt;nslock : 0×14a378a0%gt; ‘(null)’) unlocked when not locked *** Break on _NSLockError() to debug.
…. lots more deleted ….

To Canon’s credit, once you do struggle through the installer, move your images to somewhere the software can actually see it, and do all of this on a machine where the software can actually decode an image, it does a brilliant job of turning a RAW into a JPG that can be handled by Aperture or iPhoto just fine.

As an aside, the donateware RAW Photo Processor software can successfully decode T1i RAW images. It isn’t very easy to use, but at least it works. The resulting images don’t look as good as those decoded by the Canon software as they seem to have considerably more noise.

But at least it works and is straightforward to install.

For now, I’ll shoot in JPG on the camera. While it probably won’t look quite as good as using Canon’s software to do the RAW conversion on the desktop, Canon’s software is such a totally tedious pain in the ass to use, I can live with a bit of minor degradation to preserve the fun part of photography.

(I know I could shoot RAW+JPG and then import the RAW once Apple ships an update that supports the T1i, but that ain’t going to happen — I already have enough trouble keeping the photos I take now organized and don’t care to deal with that.)

We’ll be lucky to get any Osmia lignaria bees this season as they generally try to already have a nesting site by now. They are a very early season pollinator!

However, there is a second native bee that may likely take up residence and provide effective pollination services all summer. Osmia californica, another mason bee, takes over about the time lignaria is done!

I might order some tubes of Osmia californica bees to kick start the local population.

If you have any interest in gardening or flowers, or follow any kind of agricultural related financial markets, you are likely aware that one of the ecological disasters we face is known as colony collapse disorder.

Basically, the worker bees in a honey bee colony die, get lost, or otherwise just cease to function. The cause has been attributed to pollution, mites, genetic degradation, pesticides, genetically modified crops, and/or a slew of other guesses.

It is a serious problem in that bee driven pollination of crops is what sustains much of the agricultural production in the United States.

Oddly, though, the european honey bee — the bee that everyone immediately thinks of as the One True Way that flowers are pollinated to yield seeds and crops — is actually an imported species and, frankly, a bit invasive at that.

Not only invasive, honey bees tend to be territorial in that they will actively defend their hive. As well, they really aren’t even that efficient as pollinators.

Not surprisingly, there are many native pollinators buzzing or flitting about. In the South Bay, the most noticeable are the carpenter bees as they are gigantic, relatively clumsy, totally non-agressive, fuzzy, and have a noticeably loud buzz while flying.

But they aren’t the true superstars of the native North American pollinators. For that, one should look to the Mason Bee or Orchard Bee (Osmia lignaria).

The mason bee is a rather docile flying insect that is considerably smaller than the carpenter bee. Like the carpenter bee, it is non-territorial, won’t sting unless seriously threatened, and is non-swarming.

The mason bee is an extremely efficient pollinator as a single bee may visit over a thousand blooms per day.

Clearly, this is a bug whose presence should be encouraged!

Fortunately, it is easy to provide housing for such a helpful critter. Roger is standing next to a mason bee home that we made over the weekend. We chose to make one out of a block of wood. However, bundles of reeds, bamboo or — even — appropriately sized straws work quite well, too.

To make a wood based bee house, start with a block of 4″x6″ wood. Soft wood — fir or pine — works best and it must be untreated.

As the nesting holes need to be at least 4″ deep, you’ll be drilling into the 4″ side of the wood.

Draw a grid on the wood with the holes all being separated by approximately 3/4″.

Don’t worry to much about making the lines straight. The bees really don’t seem to care!

At each intersection, drill a 5/16″ or 3/8″ hole that is at least 4″ deep, preferably about 5″ deep (no more than 1/2″ from all the way through).

Hole diameter and depth is rather critical. Any narrower or any shallower and your bees will tend to produce male offspring. The male mason bees don’t live as long and are not terribly good pollinators, by comparison.

A drill press — especially one with lasers — definitely makes this particular part of construction go much much faster!

Once drilled, I also sanded the front face of the house. Not so much because I was worried about the bees getting splinters, but because the wood was soft/wet enough that some of the holes had been a bit blocked by wood after drilling. Thus, sanding opened the holes a bit.

Fit a bit of scrap wood on top of a make shift roof. It doesn’t need to hang over that much. The roof exists mostly to provide a bit of early afternoon shade and to shield the front from water running down it during rain.

If you want, you can stain the outside, but not the nesting holes, obviously.

Mount your mason bee house with a South-SouthEast exposure. It should be at least 3 feet off the ground and should be exposed to the morning sun as the morning warmth encourages the nesting bees to get out and get busy.

Simple enough. I’m not sure we put our houses out early enough in the season. We’ll see. If not, there is always next year!

At left is a picture of the first loaf of bread I have ever made.

Simple bread; the dough was comprised of nothing more than flour, water, yeast, a touch of salt and some finely minced rosemary. It was baked in a cast iron dutch oven, lid on for 30 minutes and off for 20 (the captured steam yields an amazing crunchy crust without requiring a steam injecting oven).

But that isn’t the point of this post.

Flour… water… yeast….

Minus the yeast, add some fat. And… pie dough!

No yeast, add fat, and add sugar? Cookies. Just flour and egg? Pasta.

They are all that simple. But not that simple. The key is the ratio of the ingredients.

And that brings me to the point.

Cooking is generally about taking some foundation — some basic combination of ingredients — combining them in the appropriate ratio, adding some additional goodies for flavor (cookie dough + chocolate chips…. basic bread dough + honey + nuts…. etc.), and then changing the temperature in the right way to yield good eats.

Not just doughs, but batters, sauces, stocks, sausages, brines, custards, and many other forms of food are all based around a simple set of ratios. Know the ratio of a given type of food, and you have the foundation that will yield a basic, delicious, meal or be the carrier for more far flung culinary adventures.

This book — Ruhlman’s Ratio — describes a number of the foundation ratios, the basic science behind them and then describes a handful of recipes built upon each.

I.e. it is my perfect cookbook; light on complex, single purpose, recipes, and very heavy on the cooking algorithms that can be reused and refactored.

That the above loaf of bread — both my first and the first bit of knowledge from the book that I have applied — was consumed in less than a day is evidence of the book’s success in conveying the art of cooking as accessible science.

It will not be my last loaf of bread and, more importantly, because I have learned the ratio of bread and the foundation of assembly therein, a bit of practice is all I should need to be able to throw together breads of many styles and flavors.

If you don’t already have one, you’ll want to pick up a kitchen scale, too. The book expresses all ratios in terms of weight as it is accurate (flour can vary by as much as 50% weight by volume, depending on how packed it is!) and versatile.

As well, a good kitchen scale lets you throw the mixing bowl on the scale, zero it out, measure out your flour, zero it again, dump in your water, etc… it makes cooking easier.

I picked up the one at left from a local winemaker’s / brewer’s shop. It is what they use to measure out all the little bags of product in the store.

Works quite well. Adding the optional AC adapter means that the scale doesn’t auto power off too soon and I don’t have to worry about the battery fading out in the middle of something.

There are lots of scales out there, though. Choose whatever suites your needs and aesthetics.

I have always loved banana plants. Actually kept one alive in a pot in an apartment in Columbia, MO for a few years! For an apartment banana in a cold climate, a new leaf is rare and exciting (if you are into plants anyway).

Upon moving to California, I acquired some banana plants. For free, even, though that really shouldn’t come as much surprise to other Californians.

In a more favorable climate — like California — Bananas are incredibly fast growing plants. And they multiply rapidly. A well established banana tree will produce two or three new tree stalks per year.

Fast growth? No. Really. Fast growth.

A couple of weeks ago, I was cutting the dead leaves off of our bananas and accidentally sliced new leaf growth that was coiled up inside an old leaf.

The picture at left was taken less than 4 hours after the cut was made.

But that was just a small leaf. On a different plant, I cut down a rather large bit of the central trunk. At right is a picture of the new growth after about 4.5 hours.

Now, nearly two weeks later, the leaves are nearly a yard long and mostly unfurled.

Now that the banana trees are quite well established, I’m going to have to experiment with various recipes that call for wrapping the main ingredients with a banana leaf prior to cooking.

Unfortunately, bananas in California do not generally produce edible fruit. One of our banana trees did manage to actually bloom and set a hand of bananas, but they never matured. Bees, though, absolutely love banana blossoms.

Bananas are the single most global of all of the fruit crops. Interestingly, over 90% of all bananas sold are genetically identical (sad, too, because the best bananas I have ever had were all in the other 10%– unfortunately, they don’t ship well). As with any genetic monoculture, that means the world banana supply is vulnerable to catastrophic collapse due to disease.

And that is exactly what is happening now. You can expect that the current “universal banana” — the Cavendish — will effectively go extinct in the next decade or so, to be replaced by some new species.

This has actually happened before. The previous “universal banana” was the Gros Michel banana. It was pretty much wiped out by panama disease (banana root rot, effectively) in the early 1960’s, to be replaced by the Cavendish.

The claim is that the Gros Michel was a significantly sweeter banana and the Cavendish isn’t as good.

It will be interesting to see how the global notion of banana flavor will change next!