Day 5 plus Banana tree massacre

Well it’s that time of the year…time for the banana trees to DIE!!! You have heard of the Texas chainsaw massacre…well now you’re going to hear the story about the Mississippi chainsaw banana tree massacre…

Scary stuff. Ha-ha.

I used a day of vacation Monday and decided it was time to cut down the banana trees (they die every winter and grow back bigger in the summer) I thought I would dedicate one hour of my day removing the tree…wrong!!! It end up taking me 3 or 4 hours of very hard work…banana trees are strange, very easy to cut down I used and old rusty knife

that my grandfather and I built when I was only 6 or 7 years old. My grandfather and I built many of knives over the years out of every kind of steel you can image. Truth is if we found a piece of metal laying around we made a knife out of it…why I may never know anyway for some reason I kept this knife for all these years (priceless) ok as I was saying the trees cut down real easy, but they are full of water, this makes them very heavy. That’s where the chainsaw came in

I used it to cut the 19 trees (that’s right I said 19 trees) into one foot size.

That’s where the problem comes in…Hmm 19 trees 20 to 25 feet tall divided by one foot…that’s a lot of tree parts laying on the ground plus they are in the pool area,

this means I had to throw all the part over the fence then go around and carry each part ONE BY ONE to the woods…

Ouch my back hurts just thinking about it. Ha-ha (not funny at the time) Well job well done, one thing I can check off my list of things needing to be done around the compound.

Well woke up this morning at a body weight Of 289 LB…Ouch!!! WRONG WAY BIG AL. ha-ha. Ok why all the humor about gaining weight, you ask?…well its simple…No, no I did not cheat yesterday, I was on my best behavior. Let’s just say being in the gym business for 17 years has taught me a few things. I know my body pretty well, I’m holding a ton of water due to my new workouts, and my body hurts from head to toe…very sore muscles. Its just the body trying to repair itself, sucking up all the water it can…so my weight lose may look kind of bad for a day or two…I’ll try not to panic…Ha-ha.

Big Al

NOTE: I’m going to start adding this note to each of my blog post until the 56 DAY FITNESS COUNTDOWN is over…I’m doing this incase some new readers come on and wonder what the heck is going on…if your lost look to the top left hand corner of the blog page and click on “THE START” under the 56 DAY FITNESS COUNTDOWN (LINKS)…it will explain what’s going or just use it to look at a post you might have missed…oh yea my weight loss will be posted daily just above that…hope this helps.

Fruit trees update

Wow!!! How theses little trees produce, I have lemons,

oranges,

Satsuma,

kumquat

and a monster banana tree.

Last week I picked two Satsumas’….Mmmm they were good. Here is a look at one I picked today…

not bad for a year and half old tree. The Blood oranges are doing great (still a few weeks away from the harvest) the lemons and kumquats too. The Satsuma taste great but we had to add stakes to hold the weight of the fruit.

Now lets get to the monster banana tree,

uncle Ronnie gave me a little sprout a couple of years ago (about 6” tall) now look at it…my guess would be somewhere around 25’ to 30’ tall. The strange thing about banana trees is that you cut them back to about 3’ tall every winter and they grow back bigger every spring…well this year I got bananas…lots of them….

Now for the new stuff…a couple of weeks ago I planted some lettuce

and some arugula

from seeds, here is what I got so for…time to be transplanted to a bigger pot…well see how this works out. Oh yea I forgot to mention the plum trees out front…sorry I forgot to take photos…next update. Many new fruit and nut trees to come.

As for the body experiment…nothing much new to say…it going but just barley hopefully Monday will be a better day.
More to come…
Big Al