Catching Up with the Pineapples

Now that I'm on a roll with the pineapple scene, I have a strong desire to get more of my pineapple tops into the ground. Last week as an incentive to pull weeds, I had laid down rather ugly looking layers of cardboard in my hugelpits....thus resulting in an urge to cover it up, therefore = weed pulling to gather mulch material. So along somewhat this same line of reasoning, to help kickstart myself with planting my accumulated pineapple tops, I took one of the rattier looking panfuls of tops and set them beside my entry steps, right where I'd have to look at them a dozen times a day. Finally that did the trick. Today I got 21 tops planted. Yahoo! 

The pineapple tops have been sitting in water for several weeks just waiting to get into the ground. So they are a little sad looking. But a sharp pair of scissors removes all the brown lead tips making them look a whole lot better. I remove the lower leaves, revealing the stem/stalk. This just makes it easier for the roots to form and expand out. 

Of the 21 tops I got planted today, I think 19 should make it. 2 looked in worse shape than the others. My own fault for letting them sit around too long. I still have another group to plant and hope to get to them tomorrow, if it doesn't rain too bad. Not that I can't work in the rain, but it's not as enjoyable for sure. 

Why am I planting so many pineapple tops? First, because I have them. Second, because I'm now on a mission to grow pineapples. While they are quite sellable, I also want to supply a local jam maker with fresh pineapples. He has come up with a recipe for pina colada jam that is to die for. His only problem is that he doesn't have very many pineapple plants himself. So I intend to supply him with plenty of them in exchange for jam. 

Finding Pineapple Plants

Pineapples can really get lost in the grasses and weeds. I'm not sure why, but everything likes to grow around pineapples.....just like things like to grow around very spiny cacti. Those evil little gods in life seem to take joy in watching me try to weed around a cactus! If you don't already know, the very nature of pineapple plants makes it difficult to weed around them. So my choice has been to use a generous amount of mulch to keep weeds down. Commercially, they use herbicides and plastic film, but those are not part of my farm program. So a hoe or hand sickle, plus mulch, works for me with pineapples. I just can't let the weeds over grow. Yes, I've done that too many times when I first started. And here again I find that I've neglected a patch far too long. So I have to find the pineapple plants.  

Pineapple plants -- lost

This past week 5 pineapple beds got recovered. The one pictured here was by far the worst. In the process I found a small ripe pineapple. What a nice reward! Fried pineapple with dinner tonight! I still have a few more pineapple beds to weed, and who knows, perhaps I'll find another one ready for eating. I can only hope. 

Pineapple plants -- found

Pineapples - Changing Plants

This year my garden pineapple plants turned 5 years old. They're straggly, ugly, worn out plants. Time to pull them out. Commercial farms don't let their plants get this old. Why? First of all, they are less productive. The pineapple fruits themselves are smaller. Plus the plants are sprawling in crazy directions, interfering with one another. 

So it was about time to replace those old plants and that's what I've done. I yanked out all 58 of them. But I salvaged the suckers for replanting. Not all the old plants had viable suckers, but others had two, so in the end I'm planting just about the same number of pineapples as I threw out. 

Suckers? How come there are suckers? That's what pineapple plants do. They flower and produce a pineapple fruit, then that part of the plant becomes non-productive. It gets replaced by a shoot that grows out of the stem someplace below where the pineapple got produced. It becomes a full blown sucker that can either be allowed to stay, grow, and produce its own pineapple the following year....or be removed to start a new plant elsewhere. So when I removed the old plants, I cut off the sucker for replanting.

I've moved the pineapple growing areas out of the main garden. Being sprawling perennials, they didn't work out real well there. So I've de-grassed and mulched areas around some macadamia nut trees and alongside one of the pasture paddocks. As I acquire more pineapple tops, I'll open up more spaces for them. But not in the main garden. I'm happier having them someplace that's easier to manage. 

I'm still harvesting pineapples here and there from younger plants I have scattered about the farm. Those fruits will be the source of pineapple tops for planting. And if I'm lucky, perhaps some people in my community will give me a few more. You never know when you'll get lucky. 

Eating Pineapple

Recently I've been planting a lot of pineapple. Most of it will be used for trading, but since we both love pineapple, we also eat a lot of it. If I had to buy it in a supermarket, pineapple would be a rare treat, but on this farm, I grow dozens and dozens for our own consumption.  "E" wondered how we could eat all that pineapple, considering how acidic it was. Well "E", we don't eat it raw. Well.....let's say that we seldom it eat it raw. By far we prefer it cooked. Even when I chop it up in yogurt, sales, and smoothies, I use cooked pineapple slices. 

Our number one favorite way to prepare pineapple is to pan fry it in a little tad of butter. 

Sometimes we will fry it in the same pan with porkchops, thus picking up some garlic and pepper flavoring from the pork. Other times it's just butter, or perhaps bacon grease. I could pan fry it without the butter, but at my age I'm not about to deny myself this bit of pleasure. 

I initially tried grilling it. Yes, it's good that way too. But I seldom grill anymore. The old propane griller burned out several years ago and I never got around to replacing it. So I pan fry. It's quicker and just as yummy. 

By the way "E", pan fried pineapple isn't acidic. It's sweet and mild. It won't burn the lips or make the mouth sore. 

What meals do I serve pineapple with? Any and all. We have had it with yogurt or eggs for breakfast, on sandwiches for lunch, along side porkchops or chicken breasts, or as dessert. 

Adding More Pineapples

This is pineapple season, so as I'm harvesting pineapples for home use, as gifts, or to trade, I'm getting a lot of pineapple tops. These tops are how I primarily start new plants. Around here, tips don't get discarded. No way! They get replanted to start more plants. Oh, eventually I'll have as many pineapples as I can handle, but I'm not near that limit yet.  

So since that last time I listed a tally, I've added 41 new pineapple plants to the tally, all of them scattered about the farm rather than in organized beds. And more tops are waiting for garden space to open up. 

When I can't get right away to planting a top, I will clean up the bottom (pull lower leaves off the stem) and place it in water. I'll use whatever small jar I have handy for this task. After a week or so, the tops start pushing roots, so it gets critical to plant them asap. A few of these tops have been sitting in water for over a week, so this weekend they need to get into the ground for their best chance of growing well.

I grow both the golden and the white varieties, though I have a strong preference to the white. But at this stage of the game, I'm not throwing away any golden tops. They'll get planted too as I open up space for them. Whenever I finally have a glut of pineapple plants, I plan to gradually discard the golden ones. 

Propagating Pineapples #1- Crowns

Each year that I harvest pineapples, I increase the number of pineapple plants by propagating them off my own plants. For right now, I'm using the crowns, slips, and suckers since I'm interested in getting as many plants started as I have available material. Later on I'll just use the best crowns and suckers for propagation. 

Crowns are easy to use, they are the leaf clusters atop the pineapple fruit itself. I'll just twist them off when I go to use a pineapple. Below is one I just removed from a quite yummy white pineapple that I plan to grill for dinner. 

The next step is to remove the cluster of bottom leaves so that some of the inner stalk is exposed.  I just brutally rip them off and things end up looking like this.....

Roots will grow out from that inner stalk. If I look close up, I will see little white bumps on the stalk. That's where the roots will grow. While the roots will grow even if the tough lower leaves aren't removed, the plant will establish itself far faster and more robustly if those lower leaves aren't there interfering with the growth. 

The next step is where things can get complex. Some people use a rooting hormone. Some will stick the pineapple top in a glass of water until the roots start to form, then plant it out. Others use commercial potting soil in a nursery pot, and transplant the new pineapple plant when it's shows signs of new growth. I'm from the KISS school of thought. I simply shove the top deeply into the soil at the spot I want the new plant. 

At times I don't have places ready to receive the new crowns, slips, or suckers. In this case I'll simply poke them into any bed that has room. In the photo below, I've planted crowns closely in a young ginger bed. In the next couple weeks I'll have the next pineapple bed ready to go, then I'll just move these crowns to their permanent location. In the meantime they will have been starting to push some baby roots. I find that moving them is no problem at all. The plants do fine. 

Pineapples at the Seed Farm

The seed farm is a lot hotter and drier than the big farm, so I thought that growing pineapples there might work. A friend had given me quite a few pineapple starts, and while I planted many at the community garden, I still had plenty left over. So what the heck, I took them to the seed farm.

Rather than build raised beds, I opted to plant them directly into the ground. It's mostly just crushed lava, but I've been applying mulch and a bit of dirt for the past year, gradually building up a little something that could....by your wildest dreams....be called soil. Not much there, but it does full in between the lava now.

The big problem now is water. The stuff I'm calling soil is hydrophobic organic material. Very difficult to get it wet, but once wet, it can be maintained. Pouring a bucket of water onto the stuff is a waste of good water. It just runs off. Doesn't get the "soil" wet. But I discovered that if the water is gradually trickled on, it gets absorbed.

I wish I had a drip irrigation system, but hey, I don't even have a water system. So what to do? I opted to try using old milk jugs with a pinhole in them. That way the water could drizzle out. I figure that there was nothing to lose trying it.

So I planted the pineapple keikis and mulched them with grass clippings. Close to each one I set up a gallon jug, punched a pinhole, and attached the jug to a stake so that the wind wouldn't blow it away. Then I filled all the jugs with water.

The next day I checked to see what happened. Well, it worked! The water managed to dampen the soil rather than running off. Great! So with much more enthusiasm than when I first started, I refilled the water jugs. I plan to do this once a week for the time being.

In the above picture you can make out the little spout of water if you look carefully. 

Pineapples

A ripe white pineapple ready for eating
plus 2 slips for planting. 

When I think "Hawaii", one of the many images that comes to mind is pineapples. So of course, I've just gotta grow my own pineapples!

We owned our property for a couple of years before moving here. I had  a friend keep an eye on the place for me. So whenever she had a pineapple top, she brought it along and planted it somewhere around the house. By the time we made our move, there were pineapples ready for eating. What a wonderful surprise.

These pineapples were my introduction to homegrown pineapple. When we harvested them and cut the open they seemed awfully pale in color but had the most incredible aroma and sweet tasty flesh. I was in love! I later found out that these were a white pineapple, far better than the golden ones. I'm hooked. I only grow the white ones now.

Growing pineapples is easy at my farm. They can be planted at anytime. They only require watering during a bad drought. Fertilizer makes them sweeter and really big. They grow well in rocky, rather poor soil. They do better in full sun but will also produce a small fruit in shady spots.

Two struggling plants in a cold, arid area are producing
pineapples! Amazing. These are at a friend's house and
the pineapples are actually sweet and juicy. 

To start them I use tops, suckers, and slips. For commercial farming it makes  a difference which you use, but for home production it really doesn't matter. If the keiki (baby) is good sized, I just stick it right into the ground. If it is small, I usually start it in a pot so that I can keep an eye on it and give it some pampering. But as the years go by, I find that I have an abundance of hefty keikis, so the little ones can be given away for someone else to fuss over. Some people start their keikis in a glass of water, waiting until roots are showing before planting them into soil. I don't bother. They do just fine with direct planting.

I wait to harvest the pineapple until it is yellowish and aromatic. Why pick it green? Mo better ripe! I'll let the plant continue to grow a new sucker, which I remove to replant. You could leave the plant in place and allow it to reproduce over and over again, but it gets sprawly and looks bad. Since I don't need to get maximum production, I like to restart the plants, keeping things nicer looking and easier to care for. 

The only problem I have had growing pineapples is pigs. They love them and can smell a ripe pineapple from quite a distance. Let a pig near the pineapples and they will get ruined in one night. 

variegated pineapple in bloom

There is a variegated pineapple grown here as an ornamental. It is not edible-- very fibrous. The plants is very pretty, but oh so full of sharp serrations on the leaves. It would be great to plant along a property line to keep people out. 2-3 rows deep and nobody is going to try walking through them. I like the variegated pineapple :
1- It grows very well in the shade. It gets nicely colored in the shade and does not need extra watering. Very pretty. (The sun tends to wash out the color.) 
2- Its flower stalk makes a beautiful flower arrangement addition. 
3- It doesn't require any maintenance to look pretty. No-work landscaping.