A MAN is continuing his dad’s legacy with an ever growing banana plant.

Jason Hedges, from Rochford, hit the headlines nationally in 2017, when a banana plant his late father, Wally, who was a gardener, had brought home 20 years ago, decided to sprout its first harvest of bananas for the first time in two decades.

The miracle baby bananas began sprouting a year after Jason’s dad died and he had moved into his house.

After the plant produced the fruit, it died. Which is usually the process with banana plants, and they rarely produce any fruit at all.

Jason, whose mum calls him ‘green fingered’, then cut down the plant and shortly after baby plants started appearing, which are now a flourishing crop, three years on.

Jason said: “When a banana plant produces bananas, it dies. So for the last few years I’ve had the baby plants, which sprouted up from a tap root from the mother plant that died.

“You can see the mother plant dead but they all grew from it, it’s amazing really.”

But even more strangely, after putting cuttings down from the dead mother plant, Jason put it in away in his garage, but was taken by surprise when he recently found the remains last week, still intact, with visible baby bananas still attached.

Jason, 48, said: “I left it in the garage for about three years and I would’ve thought it would have gone rotten but it wasn’t. You can still see all the bananas on it.

“I picked it and left it in the garage by the window and it was only when I was off work with a bad back recently, that I noticed it in the window of the garage and thought ‘oh, it’s still there, it looks like a corpse!’”

Jason added: “Me and my dad used to cut down the original plant every year as it never grew any bananas but it just kept growing back.

“And then one year, my friend helped me cut it down again but he really axed it to try and destroy it, but it just kept coming up and up and up, until it produced the fruit that year.”