Today I Learned @lemmy.world Deceptichum @quokk.au 6d ago

TIL Bananas are berries that grow on giant herbs

en.wikipedia.org Banana - Wikipedia

Banana trees are made up of giant leaves, not a trunk. So they're more like a giant onion instead of a tree.

61 comments

- Blueberry just chilling there in the corner the whole time, secure in their berry-ness
  
  One of the few that people accidentally named accurately.
- Are we just gonna forget about avocado too?
  
  And eggplant
- want some can'tberry juice now
- they wouldnt accept it quite so easily. their pride would make them devolve into berry cultists, never accepting the truth.
  
  Make berries berries again
They are fast-growing plants, with a growth rate of up to 1.6 metres (5.2 ft) per day.[5]

holy shit
- I feel like they'd feel pretty warm to the touch if they are growing that fast.
  
  I kinda feel like heat would be wasted energy that could be used to ｇｒｏｗ
  
  Well, they do feel warm to the touch, but bananas only grow in warm and humid climates, so everything feels that way.
- So I’ve searched and searched and my wife and I watched a lot of YouTube timelapses and we couldn’t find one that grew that fast. Not saying it isn’t the max, but it’s probably very abnormal
  
  wikipedia cites this book for reference
  
  https://archive.org/details/amazingnumbersin0000flin
  
  Anecdotal, but I've seen banana plants push out leaves vertically nearly that fast at their peak growth. Each leaf can be close to 6ft long, maybe longer. They shoot straight up out of the top of the plant when they come out, so they do temporarily add that much height.
  
  When the leave gets completely pushed out, it unfolds and leans to the side and in the end only adds a foot or less to the full height.
  
  Not sure if that counts, but they are fun plants to have. I'm in Midwest America... so you don't have to be in a tropical area to grow them, but we do have to cut it down every year and cover it in mulch and leaves to protect it.
  
  Our biggest gets to 16-18ft tall every year. One of it's children we've given away is a bit bigger.
- Fun fact: banana tree trunks grow horizontally underground. The above ground part is a leaf bunch that produces exactly one bunch in their lifetime. Which is why farmers cut it down after harvesting, to stimulate the tree to produce new shoots and more nanners.
  
  TIL
- Now check bamboo
I’ve gone down the rabbit hole. Depending on culinary, scientific, or horticulture, nobody agrees on what things are classified as.
- Exactly? Sorry, nerds ruined this one.
  
  You know what a fruit and a vegetable are. It has nothing to do where the seeds are. Botanists don't get to change the English language.
  
  Like everything else in English, you'll figure it out from context.
  
  Vegetables don't exist botanically and fruit has a very different meaning in a botanical context when compared to the culinary definition
  
  We're not talking about whether something is a fruit or a vegetable lmao
  
  This is about what kind of fruit something is, e.g. a berry vs a drupe
i chopped down a banana tree once, definitely not wood, was like cutting a large celery
- Its not a tree.
  
  What's a tree?
And there are also small cute pink self-peeling bananas (Musa velutina)
- How do they taste?
  
  Don't know. Last year I missed the opportunity to try it, hopefully I'll have another one this year.
I'm going to need a banana for scale.
No such thing as a tree really (genetically speaking), trees are just a bunch of plants that converged on a similar niche but they don't all share a common ancestor (some trees are more closely related to brocoli than other trees), lots of different things evolved into what we now call trees seperately from eachother so a bannana tree is as much a tree as any other tree.
- That doesn't mean there's no such thing as trees though. It means a tree is a growth form, a life strategy, just like a succulent, a geofyte or an epifyte. It's a group of plants that have a lot in common despite not being related, and they are well defined. And one of the important defining characteristics of a tree is true wood production, which is missing in bananas. The life form of a banana is much more similar to ginger than to any tree.
  
  Bananas are all bite and no bark.
- So trees are the flora equivalent of crabs is what you're saying.
- No such thing as a fish
- The same goes for everything that lives then. There is no such thing as a mammal, they are just a form of prototheria! A lot of them just evolved into what we consider marsupials or eutheria. But a koala is just as much a mammal as a lemur!
  
  Now this is a much smaller branch ofc, but you could slap it onto anything more vague. Reptiles, fish, crabs... and worse... fungi. Not to mention the archea.
I want to eat the ice cream bananas
I just don't respect botanical definitions any more. Who cares what they think berries, fruits, grain and nuts should be? They can't even define a tree! If anyone gets to define these terms for every English speaker, it sure isn't going to be them.

Culinary definitions all the way! Unfortunately, they have no satisfying category for rhubarb either.
Since when is an onion a herb?
- What they mean is herbaceous, aka leafy and not woody
Aren't they also mostly genetic clones? At least the ones we eat in America are, IIRC.
- Bananas grow from seeds inside the fruit. Since we bred the seeds out, now it's a clone-only plant.
No, they are nasty mush wax that should only be used for smells. Ugh, I hate touching them so much. The last time I bit one, I couldn't even chew it. Had to spit it right in the trash.
- Not sure if trolling or not, but googling around and it sounds like Sensory Processing Disorders can cause this level of passionate hatred towards bananas...
  
  Oh, definitely not trolling. I don't have many other things I have problems with, it's mostly bananas. And mushrooms. And one time I hit a lump in my mashed potatoes and threw up all over the table at a restaurant.
- No one asked.

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