Growing bananas: Gardener's friends teased him, but sweet revenge is in sight

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David Anton didn't say a word about the banana plants he'd ordered through eBay, not until they arrived at his Davis home from Florida on a winter day in 2006.

When he unwrapped them, they looked like three, 2-inch blades of grass.

When David showed them to his wife, Joan, she laughed at him.

They'll never grow - it's way too cold here in the winter, she declared. And where are we going to put them anyway?

It wasn't as though David was an unsuccessful gardener.

Though the 52-year-old is no UC Davis plant expert - he's a civil rights attorney - he and his family of four have from two backyard plots produced crops of Japanese eggplants, artichokes, strawberries, beets, broccoli and more.

Gardening even runs in David's family, sort of. Back in his native New Jersey, he watched his father, Stan, keep the weeds down old-school style, cutting holes in black plastic for his tomatoes and corn with an acetylene torch.

David tucked his banana plants into flower pots.

Three months passed. Nothing.

But come summer, they started growing at last. By fall, he'd put the 6-foot-tall plants in small wooden barrels.

Next came the real test: winter.

David eased the plants under the eaves of his house. He clothed them in plastic.

And, they made it.

I'll have to buy you a sombrero and a machete, Joan said.

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