After yesterday`s "dry" layer, it is time to add a "wet" layer to our compost.
This is comprised of anything that when you press it extracts its juices into your hands, fruit, vegetables, soft plants, flowers, etc.
Banana peels are especially good for composting, though if you have houseplants of the leafy kind, like rubber plants and palms, remember that before you compost your bananas you can run the banana skins on the leaves to give them a natural shine. Leather shoes also appreciate the same treatment. And if that surprises you, you can also rub bananas on your face - for a quick boost of vitamins B, and C, magnesium, and potassium. Use the soft side of the peel too, for that both nourishes and soothes the skin.
Once all that is done you also have another option, and that is to cut the peel into strips and dry them in the sun, then use them like a cross between fertilizer and bark chippings.
The most important thing to remember, though, is to cut up the peel. A whole banana skin takes a while to rot down around the edges. Small squares, an inch or so across, will take considerably less.
This unusual set is first listed in our Tobacco War Booklet, (RB.18, issued in 1951), under section IV, "Beauties Series (Distinctive)". And "Distinctive" is certainly right. The text is rather short, just :
68. Beauties - Fruit Girls. Girls` heads superimposed on fruit. 25 subjects, illustrated in Fig.68. Issued by B.A.T., with green net design back.
Now Fig.68 did not scan too well, and it is in black and white, but here it is anyway
However there is an online listing at CardEmp/BFG where some of them are shown in their natural colours. This is a sales list, so if it is not there in the future when you visit just let us know and we will unlink.
Note too that the backs on these cards are often a very light version of the green net back, and many of the cards have browned with age, which makes the green net blend in to the point that it becomes but a shadow of its former self. The one I use here is off another series entirely, for I failed to get anything but a whisper of a design off the actual card.
A few years later, in 1956, our original World Tobacco Issues Index lists the cards as simply :
BEAUTIES - FRUIT GIRLS (A). (25). See RB.18/68. ... B116-5
At that time, listing them so was quite understandable, because our original Tobacco War book was still easily obtainable. Today, they are jolly scarce. I think I have seen only two on the open market in the last few years, and one as a private sale (which I bought).
This has been rectified by an updated version of the book, which is now coded RB.118, and yes, it is available in our bookshop.
Changing this code, (and the card code, of course), is the only difference between the text for this set in the original and the updated World Tobacco Issues Indexes.
The heading in the World Tobacco Issues Indexes does tell us a bit more about the set, and actually it applies to all of the British American Tobacco "Section 1.A - Net Design Back in Green" cards. It says "Cards [were] issued in all overseas areas, between 1902 - 05. All small size, 67 x 38 m/m and unnumbered. Ref. USA/T.440 to USA/T.443."
Most of the cards in this section were beauties, their heads alone, cut off at the neck, and peeking rather eerily from the middle of something incongruous and exceedingly strange - like our bunch of bananas - though some, like the "Marine and Universe Girls", "Star Girls", and "Smoke Girls" are truly beautiful. The bulk of the other cards in the section are of "Chinese Girls", which are technically still beauties. That means the odd ones out are "Buildings" (a set also issued by Imperial Tobacco Co. of Canada, and Murai) - and "Chinese Trades - Set 1" (also issued by Murai). There was a "Set II" for this, but not issued by B.A.T, only by W.D. & H.O. Wills, through their "Autocar" brand (the only set that brand ever issued), and, once more by Murai, making theirs into a pair, eighty cards in total.