Suuuuuuuuuper Dwarf!

My banana has grown to about 8 inches now and has three healthy, albeit small, green leaves! I brought it up from the basement to give it better light. No sign of spider mites yet but we shall see in the next few weeks. I am taking a chance bringing it up with my other plants since it was so infested. I put so much poison in the dirt that anything that takes a bite of the banana will surely perish. I hope that in the spring I can take the tree out of the pot and cut some of the root ball off because it is growing off-center and will not have much room on one side.
I got to go to Montreal for my birthday this past Saturday and visit the Botanical Gardens. It was pure heaven for me! Banana trees everywhere!! Did you know they are a Monocotyledon just like corn? There is also a bonzai room that was very cool because that is something I am interested in trying. Some of the trees in there were almost 100 years old! And the deciduous ones drop their leaves in the fall just like regular trees! I got to identify some of the plants I have that I didn't know the name of and see how my plants would grow in nature. My Maranta is definitely in the wrong kind of pot! I didn't realize they were ground cover plants. In the spring I am going to give all of my house plants a "makeover". I can't wait until summer!

More Impossibilities...

Well I bought a mango at the grocery store the other day and when I opened it up I had no idea what to expect. It was horrible to try and cut the meat off because it was so slippery but I did the best I could because my 18 month old daughter loved the taste I gave her! I kept running into this huge hard area in the middle. Little did I know it was a single seed that was the entire length of the fruit! That's about 4 inches!! I have never seen such a big seed that only contains 1 cultivar. So being the dreamer that I am, I envisioned planting it in a huge pot and perhaps having a dwarfed mango tree. Then I researched and found that it sends out a 20 foot taproot and grows up to 65 feet high! Not that I have enough light to get it that big but still that is huge!!! I of course will try to get it to sprout anyway just because its fun. If I am successful I will definitely post pictures on here of it. Here is an example of what a mango seed looks like:

I wish there was a ruler next to it so you could see the actual length. Here is a link to a mango growing project for kids to try. They treat it like we northerners treat bean projects!