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Ikea bananas sprout in Swede's living room

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Ikea bananas sprout in Swede's living room

A 61-year-old man from southern Sweden doesn't head to the supermarket for a banana - he simply pops into his living room where his Ikea banana plant has just bloomed for the first time in years.

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Bengt Sandström from southern Sweden is a man with green fingers. When he heard the local Ikea was closing down two-and-a-half years ago, he knew it was a chance to snap up a bargain on the banana plants he'd seen there before.

"I asked my girlfriend to get me one of the banana plants from the Helsingborg Ikea before it closed down, but she told me that I have too many trees already," Sandström told The Local.

His property already boasts peach and fig trees, as well as the odd vegetable. But luckily for Sandström, his girlfriend eventually agreed that one more plant couldn't hurt.

"She must have got a bad conscience because she went back to get it for me," Sandström said with a laugh.

"It was the last banana plant in the shop - it was even half price."

While the plant remained fruitless for the next 30 months, Sandström was thrilled to see a fresh bud on the tree this past autumn, followed by a yield of 27 bananas since then.

And now, with the yellowing yield ripe enough to eat for the first time, Sandström and his girlfriend have wasted no time in trying his home-grown produce.

"We've had five or six bananas so far - and they taste great," he trumpeted to The Local.

"And they taste just like the ones you'd get from the shop."

Oliver Gee

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